Probing English&Persian Translation of Quranic Culture Specific Items

This book aims to assess the strategies used in translating Culture Specific Items(CSIs) in two translations of Quran, one translated by J. Arberry in English and the other by Ghomshei in Persian. The theoretical frameworks of this study were based on the categories proposed by Newmark (1988) about the CSIs in literary texts and strategies modeled by Ivir(1987). From the theoretical part, the authors chose the following categories from Newmark classification including ecology, material culture & social culture, organization, customs, activities, procedures and also concepts, gestures and habits. They decided that Vladimir Ivir (1987) seven strategies for translating culture-specific items including: Definition, Literal translation, Substitution, Lexical creation, Omission, Addition, and Borrowing, were appropriate to be used as the theoretical framework of this study. The analysis of the data showed that substitution, literal translation, borrowing and addition have been adopted by the selected translators in this study. the most appropriate procedure for translating CSIs in the Holy Quran into English was the substitution strategy and into Persian was addition strategy.