acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to all those who have helped me in preparing this thesis. i would like to express my deep gratitude to my respected advisor dr. kourosh akef, whose advice and comments helped me in the early stages of the research and throughout the writing process. i would also like to express my gratitude to dr. hajar khanmohammad whose invaluable guidance helped me in preparing this research project. finally, warm thanks to my family, especially to my mother whose help and encouragements were so important that i could not have continued my studies without her supports. abstarct this study was conducted to identify and compare the strategies applied by two persian native translators in rendering culture specific items (csis) of a persian literary text entitled ‘savo??n’. in this study csis refer to the materials, concepts, and traditions available in one language and culture, but non-existent in the other language and culture. aixel?’s proposed strategies of translation of csis were taken as the model of this study and 280 extracted csis from the original novel were categorized according to the classification proposed by newmark in 1988. the researcher compared the two translated versions, one of them entitled savushun translated by mohammad reza ghanoonparvar in 1990, and the other one translated by roxane zand in 1991, entitled persian requiem. the results of the comparison were as follows: a) the most frequently used strategy by ghanoonparvar was extra-textual gloss (26.701%). in fact he has explained 120 csis extra-textually. the most frequently used strategy by zand was linguistic translation (22.513%). she has explained 35 items extra-textually while only named proper names under the general titles of hazrat, imam, shahnameh and ta’zieh. b) none of the translators has used a single strategy in rendering csis under a specific category. c) extra-textual gloss was the major strategy by both translators in rendering proper names of ‘savo??n’. list of tables table (4.1): classification of 280 csis of ‘savo??n’ table (4.2): persian foods and their english translations and strategies table (4.3): clothes and their english translations and strategies table (4.4): houses and their english translations and strategies table (4.5): transport and its english translations and strategies table (4.6): objects and their english translations and strategies table (4.7): measurement and its english translations and strategies table (4.8): places and their english translations and strategies table (4.9): social culture and their english translations and strategies table (4.10): social customs and their english translations and strategies table (4.11): legal ideas and their english translations and strategies table (4.12): religious concepts and their english translations and strategies table (4.13): the frequency and percentage of strategies used by translators in rendering csis table (4.14): proper names and their english translations and strategies table (4.15): the frequency and percentage of strategies used by translators in rendering proper names table (4.16): names and their english translations list of figures figure (4.1): percentages of strategies used by m. r. ghanoonparvar figure (4.2) percentages of strategies used by r. zand figure (4.3) percentages of strategies used by m. r. ghanoonparvar in rendering 52 proper names figure (4.4) percentages of strategies used by roxane zand in rendering 52 proper names