A Study of Translators’ Approach in Dealing with Culture-specific Items in Translation of Children’s Fantasy Fiction

This study aimed to investigate translators‟ approach in dealing with culture-specific items (CSI) in translation of fantasy fiction for children. For this purpose, the culture-specific items in Persian translations of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien‟s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as well as Lewis‟s The Chronicles of Narnia were taken into consideration. Since children have limited amount of knowledge and language ability, translators of children‟s novels may encounter difficulties while dealing with culture-specific items. They cannot easily decide whether to domesticate or foreignize such items. The reason to select these novels was that these are highly fantasy, localized novels, and are expressive of the country where they were developed. They are also very popular novels and strongly related to fairy tales, myths, and legends. They demonstrate obvious deviation from reality and abound in culture-specific items. This descriptive research employed a parallel corpus study and a consolidation of translation procedures introduced by four theorists, i.e. Aixelá , Davies, Fernandes, and Klingberg as the theoretical framework. The results of the study were indicative of the translators‟ source-oriented tendency and the most frequently applied strategy was transliteration.