Strategies applied by native and non-native translators to transfer persian culture-specific Items: A case study on Saadi's Gulistan

The process of translation from one language into another is a very sensitive job as the translator needs to give importance to the cultural aspects of translation. Newmark (1988) points out five areas from which cultural items may come and twenty strategies for the translation of Culture-Specific-Items (CSIs).This research focused on translating CSIs in eight entrances of Saadi’s Gulistan and its two translations by a native and a non-native Persian translator. Through a quantitative and qualitative investigation, the research attempted to consider the application of Newmark's cultural category to distinguish CSIs. The data extracted from the corpus were rated by two raters to calculate inter-rater reliability.Consequently, two hundred twenty two CSIs were detected in the corpus and the results of data gathering and analysis indicated that "synonymy" was the most frequently employed strategy for translating CSIs by the two translators. This paper presents new insights in the field of CSI translation.