Persian Translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Venuti’s Domestication/Foreignization Dichotomy in Focus

Abstract

Translation of cultural-specific items (CSIs) has always been a challenge for translators. To overcome this problem, translators employ different strategies. The purpose of the current study was to analyze Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) in an English translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland based on Venuti’s Domestication/Foreignization dichotomy. The design of the study was a descriptive one. Thus, the translation strategies used in the translations were identified and compared. The results indicated that domestication was the most pervasive strategy in the translation of Pirzad and Haran. Contrasting each ST-TT pair of the first part of the corpus, seventy-one examples of culture–specific samples were manually collected and systematically classified into six procedures of domestication strategy including Explanation, Addition, Cultural Equivalence, Cultural Adjustment, Deletion, Syntactic Adjustment, and three procedures of foreignization strategy; namely, Transliteration (loan word), Literal translation, and Calque. The findings revealed that domestication was far more frequently used in TT1 (93/13%) compared to foreignization (6/83%), while in TT2, domestication (87/64%) was more frequent compared to foreignization (12/31%). The most frequent culture-specific items in TT1 and TT2 related to this category were idioms, measuring systems, and food.