Strategies Applied in Translation of Culture-Specific Items in Literary Texts

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to identify the possible problems concerning lexical gaps that translators may encounter while translating literary texts. To this end, literary texts and their translations were searched for the domains in which CSIs could be found; they were then analysed and the strategies which were applied by the translators to solve the problems were identified. Usually where there is a cultural focus, there is a translation problem due to the possible cultural gap or distance between source language and target language. Some words and phrases are so heavily and exclusively grounded in one culture that they seem almost impossible to translate into another. Translators are faced with the problem of finding adequate equivalents for the language-specific words; therefore, they search for strategies to cope with these problems and aim at finding a way to express the important meaning components of the word or phrase.