A Comparative Study of Translation Strategies Applied in Dealing with Culture-Specific Items of Romance Novels before and after the Islamic Revolution of Iran

Abstract

The present research is a comparative study of strategies applied in translating culture-specific items (CSIs) of romance novels in the two periods in the history of Iran namely, before the Islamic Revolution of Iran (taking place in 1979) and after the Revolution that is ‘Islamic republic government’ vs. ‘Pahlavi dynasty’ in order to see how the sociocultural situations of the respective eras have affected the choice of strategies applied by Iranian translators. In order to achieve this objective, four masterpieces of English literature including ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘The Scarlet Letter’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Gone with the Wind’ as well as their pertinent translations from before and after the Islamic Revolution (IR)were compared and contrasted. Extracting CSIs of the novels and applying Aixelá’s model (1996) for eliciting translation strategies, the results then were put into numerical mode in order to explore the frequencies of translation strategies applied in each period. The results of data analysis revealed the most and least frequent strategies of each period, the significant difference between them and the predominance of conservative approach toward the translation of CSIs of romance novels in both periods with a more conservative tendency before the Revolution and more Substitution nature after the Revolution.