A Descriptive Study of Culture-Specific Items in Persian Translations of Harry Potter Novels

Cross-cultural translation of children's literature is one of the areas that easily trap a translator with lots of problems. It is rather a difficult task for a child to establish a connection with some other cultures and their exclusive features. Even if a child-reader enters the scene and decides to read a child a translated text, s/he needs to fully grasp the message and meaning of the text in order to be able to deal with the child's numerous questions satisfactorily. Hence the matters get worse, there the translator is, hesitating which path to take; domesticate or Foreignism? This study is going to analyze translations of culture-bound food and goods in two books of Harry Potter series and translation strategies adopted. The criterion for analysis is a list of strategies to tackle with culture-specific terms, proposed by Davies (2003). Afterwards, the translations are examined for being either acceptability-oriented or adequacy-oriented. The findings of the study assert that it is hardly possible to identify the tendency of translations towards being adequacy-oriented or acceptability-oriented because translation strategies of preservation and localization, derived from the proposed list, are very close in times of occurrence.