Translating Culture-Specific Items in Children’s Literature: Two Persian Translations of Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland Sasan Mirdashti1 Mohammad Ghazanfari2 Abstract Nowadays, translation plays a significant role in people’s daily lives. It has even been argued that translation can have long-term effects on whole languages and cultures. Translation is not a mere linguistic act, but a cultural act, since language is by nature the most outstanding manifestation of cultural representations. Thus, the translators’ job is not merely translating and conveying words and sentences from the source text to the target text; they have to transfer cultural characteristics as well. Culture-specific items often cause translation problems. Sometimes reference to such elements is completely left out by translators. Investigation of culture-specific items in children’s literature and the strategies the translators have applied in rendering such elements has been the focus of the present paper. The study, employing an exact text analysis approach, has focused on culture-specific items in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland, as the source text, and the translation strategies (e.g., domestication, foreignization, etc.) the two Persian translators, namely, Mahnaz Fasihi (1990/1369) and Ali Habibian(2005/1384), have applied in conveying such items. The culturespecific items have been classified in terms of Newmark’s (1988) taxonomy and the source texts have been analyzed in terms of Venuti’s dichotomy. The 1 . M.A. in Translation Studies Imam Reza University of Mashhad mirdashti.sasan@yahoo.com 2 . Associate professor, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad mghazanfari@um.ac.ir National Conference on Translation and Interdiscplinary Studies 53 results indicate that domestication has been applied more frequently than foreignization by the couple of translators. Keywords: Culture-specific items, Domestication, Foreignization, Children’s literature, Newmark’s taxonomy

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