Culture-Specific Items in the English into Persian Translation of Inferno: Applying the Classification of Vinay and Darbelnet

There have always been problems translating culture-specific items because of the differences between the source and target language cultures. For example, differences exist between languages regarding religions, rituals, clothes, food, and communication norms, though some cultures may be extremely close. The present study aimed to examine the strategies used to translate the culture-specific items in the novel “Inferno” (Brown, 2013) from English into Persian by the Iranian translator Manizhe Jalali (2013). The data was first extracted from the source text based on Newmark’s (1988) and Aixela’s (1996) theoretical models. Then, Vinay and Darbelnet’s classification (1958) was applied to find the strategies used by the translator to render culture-specific items. To achieve the study's goal, the researcher extracted 1000 culture-specific items from the novel “Inferno.” The Persian translations of these items were studied using a corpus-based and descriptive design to recognize the equivalents chosen by the translator. The content analysis results indicated that the translator used 12 different types of strategies: borrowing, literal translation, adaptation, explicitation, generalization, amplification, transposition, calque, particularization, reduction, equivalence, and implicitation. The results also showed that borrowing, literal translation, and amplification were the most prevailing and frequently applied translation procedures, while equivalence, particularization, implicitation, and transposition were the least frequently utilized ones. It was also found that no modulation strategy was used regarding culture-specific items in the translation of the novel “Inferno” from English into Persian. The results of this study are helpful for general readers, translators, and translation teachers to select the more appropriate translation strategies, which results in a better understanding of literary books.