Applying Newmark’s Strategies in the English Translation of Parvin Etessami’s Poetry with a Cultural Perspective

Language and culture are closely interrelated and besides linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge is crucial for a translator. Culture and linguistics specifically intertwine during poetry translation. To manifest this interconnectedness, the present study was focused on the poems of Parvin Etessami, a 20th-century Persian poetess, to determine the cultural elements in her poems and investigate their English translation. Eighteen couplets of Etessami’s poems were randomly selected to represent her poetry as a whole. The method was comparative-descriptive and the theoretical framework was based on Newmark’s (1988) strategies of translation. The concept of culture was studied within the paradigm of linguistics. The results of the analyses implied that in the majority of cases, Pazargadi resorted to two or more translation strategies for translating a cultural item simultaneously, indicating Newmark’s translation strategy of “couplets”. The second most frequent translation strategy was “modulation”. The translation strategies of “synonymy” and “reduction” were the least frequent ones. The strategies of “recognized translation”, “translation labels”, and “compensation” were not present in the selected samples. Hence, these strategies are not mentioned in the theoretical framework. The analyses indicated that the translator applied a literal translation besides different strategies to convey the intended meanings and preserve the style of the original poems.