Globalization and Its Effect on the Novels Translated into Persian: A Postcolonial Approach

Translation can be considered as one of the ways which make different cultures closer to each other. Sometimes this affinity can make cultures to adopt some cultural elements. Cronin (2003) named this phenomenon "globalization". This becomes an important issue when it comes to dominant and dominated cultures. This study was intended (1) to show how globalization can affect translations of Persian novels and (2) to show what strategies the translators use, in order to see if translation and globalization serve English language and impose Western culture into dominated culture, or help dominated cultures to become globally known. "Domestication" and "foreignization" strategies introduced by Venuti (1995) have been considered as main framework of this study. In order to analyze the effects of globalization, culture-specific items have been chosen as the unit of the study. The corpus of the study was an American novel entitled, The New York Trilogy, written by Paul Auster and its Persian translation by Khojaste Keyhan and Shahrzad Lolachi. The analysis revealed that although foreignization strategy is more common; whenever an element is against Iran's religious or traditional rules, domestication strategy was preferred. Index Terms--globalization, culture specific items, foreignization, domestication, postcolonial approach