A Study of Translation Strategies of Islamic Cultural Specific Items In Fiction

Abstract

Translating peculiar religious lexicon is a difficult process especially when it is processed from Eastern religions to the Western languages due to unavailability of the Eastern religious norms in the West. A language is developed in a certain community and it contains the word bank related to the norms of that community, so there is a chance a language lacks some words that are not a regular part of thecertain community. These lacking may be observed while translating a far-off culture, especially religious bearings of a distancing source language (SL), no matter how much the target language (TL) is developed. Literature is a richaccumulation of the religious values of an area and so its translation is a big source of construal of such religious values. Basing the stated fact, the current study is about the translation of Islamic Cultural Specific Items (CSIs) that are present in the English fictional translations of Intizār Hussain’s Urdu short stories. The translation is viewed under special translation strategies for CSIs proposed by Lawrence Venuti known as Domestication and Foreignization.