Analyzing translations of culturally-bound expressions in span of Time

Abstract

Translation of masterpieces of a nation’s classic literature poses great challenges to translators. One of the major challenges is the issue of dealing with culturally-bound expressions (CBEs). In the current study, the researcher aimed at exploring the effect of time-span on rendering Sa’di’s Gulistan. To this end, two English translations by Ross (1823) and Arnold (1899) were studied based on Davies’s (2003) model. She has proposed seven procedures among which ‘Preservation’, ‘Transformation’, and ‘Omission’ were deemed low-productive. These, together with ‘Mistranslated’ CBEs, were regarded as a criterion for assessing the performance of the two translators on lexical-semantic level. As far as rendering CBEs were concerned, findings of the study showed that time-span has had no positive effect on avoiding low-productive procedures. Since most of the challenging CBEs were categorized in the realm of ‘Social life’ and ‘Religion’, the prospective translators, who intend to re-translate a classical Persian masterpiece, are highly recommended to gain adequate knowledge in the two realms. Inaccessibility to other translations of the Gulistan was a limitation of the study; therefore, researchers are suggested to find other translations from the 20th or 21st century and also focus on other potential factors affecting the quality of rendering CBEs.