A Study of Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner’s” Translations into Persian, with a Focus on Culture Specific Items in the Novel

Farideh Seifjamali¹ Abdullah Bagheri Hamidi²

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Publication : 2nd International Conference on Management and Humanities(2icmhconf.com)
Abstract :
The major events of the novel in English, Khaled Husseini’s “The Kite Runner” (2003), while framed in the context of the major character’s life, follow Afghanistan’s transitions as well. In Amir’s recollections of his childhood, the calm state of Kabul during the monarchy, the founding of the republic, and then the Soviet invasion and infighting between rival Afghan groups which ruin the country are seen. These events have a hand in dictating the novel’s plot and have significant effects on the lives of the characters involved. The novel was translated into Persian by Ziba Ghanji and Parisa Soleimanzadeh (2004) and Mehdi Ghabraii (2006). Relying on the distinction between the two main translation strategies, namely of source language oriented strategy and Target language oriented strategy postulated by Jan Pederson in 2005, the study attempted to explore the way the English novel “The Kite Runner” had been portrayed in the Persian cultural context. Extracting CSIs of the novel according to the combined model proposed by Newmark (1988), Tomalin and Stempleski (1993), and Espindola (2006) and applying Pederson’s model (2005) for eliciting translation strategies, the researcher put the results and discussions into distinct tables in order to explore the dominant translation strategies applied in each translation. The current product-oriented descriptive translation research was a qualitative attempt to describe and analyze cultural translation strategies in the corpus of the research and did not intend to judge the correctness of translations or appropriateness of the application of translators’ ideological presuppositions. The result showed that translating cultural elements could be a demanding task due to the fact that such elements had specific meanings in the culture and language in which they arise. To gather the required data, the mentioned book was studied thoroughly. Then the culture-bound elements of this book were detected and were compared with their Persian translations to identify the strategies used in translating them. Finally, the investigation of the used strategies to find out which translation has the highest potential for conveying the intended meaning was observed.
Keywords : Keywords: Culture-specific items (CSIs) Translation strategies Source language oriented translation and Target language oriented translation literary translation