The Role of Domestication and Foreignization Strategies in Translating Culture-Specific Items: The Evaluation of the Translated Work Pride and Prejudice

Different cultures influence the way the members of a society view and perceive the world. This principle is important in the translation phenomenon. Relying on the distinction between two maincultural strategies of domestication and foreignization postulated by Lawrence Venuti in 1988, thepresent study aims to examine translating culture-specific items from English into Persian and the way they are rendered. For this purpose, this study aimed to achieve two objectives. First, it tried to investigate different strategies used by the Persian translator in translating culture-specific items inEnglish novel Pride and Prejudice, and second, it sought to explore the dominant cultural translation strategy in the dichotomy of domestication and foreignization. In this study, the original novel and its Persian translation were compared with each other. To begin with, the culture-specific items in theoriginal novel were detected and their Persian rendering by the translator were identified. Then, these items were categorized using Newmark’s (1988) classification. Finally, the strategies employed by the Persian translator of the same text while dealing with culture-specific items were identified. In thepresent research the strategy of domestication is divided into 7 procedures: adaptation, approximation,synonymy, addition, deletion, reduction and cultural equivalent and the strategy of foreignization is divided into three procedures: borrowing, calque, and literal translation. According to the obtained results both domesticating and foreignizing strategies have been used. The findings of the studyrevealed that the following strategies were adopted by the Persian translator to render culture-specific items in the novel: borrowing, synonymy, approximation, deletion, calque, and cultural equivalent.The translator had given priority to foreignization strategies and he also indicated that borrowing is the most frequently used strategy.