Proverbial Discourse Translation-A Study of Persian Language and Culture
Proverbial Discourse Translation-A Study of Persian Language and Culture

Summary/Abstract: Through the symbolic stories derived from Persian folklore, some of the actual anthropological environmental domains in Iran are conceptualized culturally and reflected in Persian animal-related proverbs. Translating these rich cultural conceptualisations underlying proverbs from the Persian world to the Western world, where the cultural and linguistic gaps between these two worlds are conspicuous, necessitates applying a coherent multidisciplinary approach. An approach that reconciles two fields, language and culture, which have, paradoxically, been antagonistic in Translation Studies (Koskinen, 2004, 2010, 2014), as an intertwined, interdependent and inseparable approach. Adopting such a cutting-edge approach to translation, namely Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian, 2017b) approach, for the first time in translation history, and through a careful analysis of numerous examples from Persian, we demonstrate that in current translation approaches, cultural conceptualisations underlying the wit and wisdom of the proverbial discourse are lost. Hence, we question current translation approaches through dif erent systems of cultural conceptualisations (cf. Sharifian, 2018) that each particular speech community draws upon in intercultural communication. Moreover, we argue that translation is not “only” a problem of language, but also, more importantly, a problem of systems of cultural conceptualisations underlying language and language use.

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