A Cross-cultural Study of Animal Symbolism in the Persian Renderings of Children's Literature

Abstract Animals are among culture-bound items which make the translation practice a difficult task for translators and needspecific considerations on the part of the translators. In fact, animals in each culture carry some symbolic meanings with themselves which are specific to that culture and are different from those carried in other cultures. Accordingly, the present study aimed at investigating the Literature. It also sought to find the effectiveness of using such strategies regarding the target audiences.To achieve these goals, eleven animal terms, with different symbolic meanings in western and Persian culture, were investigated in twelve western children’s books and their Persian translations. Then, based on Venuti's (۱۹۹۵) categorization of translation strategies, they were categorized into two main domestication and foreignization translation groups to see which group keeps more preferred strategy among Persian translators of children's literature. The effectiveness of using such strategies was measured by interviewing thirty Persian first grade students to elicit their strategies adopted by Persian translators to render the symbolic meaning of animals in children's knowledge about the symbol of animals and comparing them with the used strategies. The results showed that most of the Persian translators tend to foreignize these cultural terms. However, the results of the interview revealed that children recognize the native symbolic meanings of animals more than their foreign ones. It was concluded that the strategies used by Persian translators is not an appropriate one for translating cultural symbolic terms for Persian children.

Keywords:

Symbol , children's literature , translation strategy , Foreignization , Domestication