Faranak Jahangard; Tayyebeh Golestani
Abstract
Bahramshahi’s Kalīla wa-Dimna was translated into Persian through an intermediary language. However, the didactic and religious aspects of Bahramshahi’s Kalīla wa-Dimna have a strong association with the Iranian society and culture of the sixth century. This study is based on Polysystem ...
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Bahramshahi’s Kalīla wa-Dimna was translated into Persian through an intermediary language. However, the didactic and religious aspects of Bahramshahi’s Kalīla wa-Dimna have a strong association with the Iranian society and culture of the sixth century. This study is based on Polysystem Theory and Gideon Toury’s three-stage methodology. According to his methodology, the translation should be situated within the target culture and the themes which are common to the translation and target culture be extracted. Then, the target text segments are mapped onto the source language segments, and finally the strategies used in the translation are categorized. The findings suggested that the themes of Kalīla wa-Dimna stories (whether from a global perspective or from an Iranian or Indian perspective) are common among Asian religions and Eastern nations. These themes carry religious and moral values. In the second step, the story “The Seabird and The Sea Agent” was compared and contrasted against its counterpart “Simorgh and Gruda” in the Panchatantra. The comparative analysis suggested the two mythical birds had a similar origin. This is followed by the identification of such translation strategies as deletion, modification, replacement and enhancement in the target text. It was found that the translator used these strategies to create a balance between the source culture and the target culture. This study also showed that the target culture played a central role in Nasrollah Monshi’s translation, which assisted the translator to render culture-specific items. The translator brought the text closer to the dominant discourse by increasing the number of ideological elements in the text.
