Translation and Culture: Analyzing Culture Oriented Concepts in Translation Anecdotes of Gulistan Sa'adi

This study sought to investigate the culture-oriented concept in a literary text based on Newmark's (1998) model. More specifically, the study was conducted to find the applied strategies in English translation anecdotes of Gulistan Sa'adi. It also highlighted if Newmark's strategies distributed equally through the translation. Moreover, the shortcomings of the translation were presented. The corpus composed of the Persian textbook of Gulistan Sa'adi as Source Text (ST), with the English translation as Target Text (TT) by Rehatsek (2010). Data were analyzed and the results are presented in the form of tables. After analyzing and interpreting data, some major shortcomings have been observed in the English version as vague, unclear, meaningless translation and omitted words have been observed in the English version. Moreover, all the cultural strategies were applied by the translator, but none of them were equally distributed in English translation of Gulistan Sa'adi. Based on the received data, "Paraphrase" and "Synonymy" strategies have been used in many cases and frequently by translator. "Paraphrase" strategy is most commonly used in the cases that the translator could not find any equivalents for the source items and the translator is forced to explain the meaning of the cultural items and the explanation is much more detailed than the equivalents. In the case of synonymy strategy, the translator renders near translation of an SL word or expression with a TL expression, but not completely. However, the least frequent strategies were "naturalization", "shift /modulation" and "couplets" strategies which found just in one case.