A Study of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner’s Translations into Persian, with aFocus on Culture Specific Items in the Novel

The major events of the novel in English, Khaled Husseini’s The Kite Runner (2003),while framed in the context of the major character’s life, follow Afghanistan’s transitions aswell. In Amir’s recollections of his childhood, the calm state of Kabul during the monarchy,the founding of the republic, and then the Soviet invasion and infighting between rivalAfghan groups which ruin the country are seen. These events have a hand in dictating thenovel’s plot and have significant effects on the lives of the characters involved. The novelwas translated into Persian by Ziba Ghanji and Parisa Soleimanzadeh (2004) and MehdiGhabraii (2006). Relying on the distinction between the two main translation strategies,namely of source language oriented strategy and Target language oriented strategy postulatedby Jan Pederson in 2005, the study attempted to explore the way the English novel The KiteRunner had been portrayed in the Persian cultural context. Extracting CSIs of the novelaccording to the combined model proposed by Newmark (1988), Tomalin and Stempleski(1993), and Espindola (2006) and applying Pederson’s model (2005) for eliciting translationstrategies, the researcher put the results and discussions into distinct tables in order to explorethe dominant translation strategies applied in each translation. The current product-orienteddescriptive translation research was a qualitative attempt to describe and analyze culturaltranslation strategies in the corpus of the research and did not intend to judge the correctnessof translations or appropriateness of the application of translators’ ideologicalpresuppositions. The result showed that translating cultural elements could be a demandingtask due to the fact that such elements had specific meanings in the culture and language inwhich they arise. To gather the required data, the mentioned book was studiedthoroughly. Then the culture-bound elements of this book were detected and were comparedwith their Persian translations to identify the strategies used in translating them. Finally, theinvestigation of the used strategies to find out which translation has the highest potential forconveying the intended meaning was observed

Keywords:

Culture-specific items (CSIs) , Translation strategies , Source language orientedtranslation , and Target language oriented translation , literary translation