Translation of the Taboo Terms of Genital Organs in Nahj-ul-Balagheh: A Critique on the Translations of Faiz al-Islam, Ayati, Shahidi, Ma’adikhah and Dashti

Translation is a major means of spreading a culture. The tenets and teachings of a school of thought as well as cultural concepts can, indeed, be spread or conveyed from one culture to another through translation. The success of this transmission depends on how challenging texts are to render and how skillfully translators cope with it. One of the text types that pose a considerable challenge to translators is religious texts. This is due to the ideological and rhetorical sensations that they may induce and the depth of religious concepts. A specific factor that makes the translation of such texts even more challenging is the presence of certain taboo terms. As culture-bound elements, some of these terms are not easy to convey cross-linguistically. In this regard, a descriptive-analytical method and library sources are used in the present study to evaluate the Persian translation of the terms about genital organs in Nahjul-Balagheh. As the results indicate, those terms refer to women’s breasts, milking, sucking of milk, male and female genital organs, showing of those body parts, and womb. It is also found that some translators such as Feyz al-Islam, Ayati, Shahidi, Ma’adikhah and Dashti have turned those terms into Persian mainly through the linguistic approaches of semantic maintenance and semantic substitution.