Domesticating/Foreignizing Strategies in Translating the Persian Writer’s Style: Two Voices of a Blind Owl

This paper investigates the Persian writer’s style through domesticating/foreignizing strategies used in two English translations of Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. As the ‘thumbprint’, style is concerned with some recurring patterns of linguistic habits of any writer; hence, any translator. As proposed by Venuti, these strategies may result from various shifts made by translators in transferring the ST style into the TT one. The question is raised: Is there any relationship between the translator’s style and the used strategies by the translators? Having reviewed the main literature and strategies, this paper puts into practice the main used strategies in 200 sentences chosen randomly from each English translation of the novel, related to the given categories of domestication and foreignization. The results showed that Costello’s translation was dominated by such domesticating strategies as borrowing and extra-lingual gloss; Bashiri’s with foreignizing ones. In both translations, the dominant domesticating strategies are deletion, approximation, and paraphrasing. However, regarding the macro-level structure, keeping or losing the original author’s style has nothing to do with domesticating/foreignizing strategies. In conclusion, it seems perplexing to apply such strategies to the texts translated from non-hegemonic languages such as Persian into hegemonic languages such as English.