Translation and Culture: A Case Study of Culture-specific Items in the Persian Renderings of The Alchemist

This study aimed at investigating domestication and foreignization strategies in Persian translations of The Alchemist by Coelho based on Vinay and Darbelnet’s taxonomy. To this end, the study benefited from a corpus-based comparative content analysis design within a qualitative approach. The corpus of this study consisted of 80 pages of the mentioned novel, selected through simple random sampling, and their Persian translations by Hejazi and Ghahreman. Analysis of the elicited data was conducted using descriptive statistics (i.e., calculation of frequency and percentage of domestication and foreignization strategies and chi-square test. The results obtained from data analysis showed that Hejazi has used the following strategies: Calque (foreignization), equivalence (domestication), adaptation (domestication), and literal translation (foreignization). In like manner, the results revealed that Ghahreman too has used calque (foreignization), equivalence (domestication), adaptation (domestication), literal translation (foreignization), modulation (domestication), and omission (domestication) in translating the culture-specific items (CSIs). This finding approves the previously-conducted research findings that the difficulty in translating cultural aspects of language forces translators to utilize a variety of translation strategies in rendering them.