Analyzing the Impact of Culture-Specific Terms in the Translation of Mirat-ul-Aroos: An Investigation into Employed Translation Strategies

Abstract

This research article aims to identify the culture-specific terms from the English text Bride’s Mirror translated by G.E. Ward (1903). This text is the translation of the Urdu novel Miraat-ul-Aroos written by Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi (1869), an Urdu novelist. This specific novel is selected by the researcher to address the research gap, as no research was conducted on the novel Bride’s Mirror (1903) from this particular perspective. Identifying the culture-specific terms from an original text and translating or making those unknown specific terms a suitable part of the source text is one of the difficult tasks of a translator while translating a source text into the target text. The main purpose of this research is to identify culture-specific terms of the source language in the target text and determine the type of those terms. A qualitative research design is adopted for the research in order to investigate the impacts of cultural terms on translation. For this purpose, a textual analysis is conducted of this particular novel Bride’s Mirror (1903). Eugene Nida’s theory of translation from the perspective of formal and dynamic equivalence is adopted for analysis. The textual analysis is also conducted in terms of Lawrence Venuti’s theory of domestication and foriegnization. After analyzing the data, it is also investigated what strategies are used by the translator in order to deal with culture-specific terms in the source text. The results showed that there are a lot of culture-specific terms of source language in the translation, such as names of food items that are symbols of the tradition of the source culture. Religious terms are also part of the text, which represents Muslim ideology, which is the core feature of Muslim society. The names of the characters are also specifically based on Muslim culture. At the end, translation strategies are also determined that were used by the translator to deal with these culture-specific terms.