Translating Persian Metaphors into English

Literary translation has been a concern of many scholars and translators throughout history. One of the problematic issues in literary translation is the translation of metaphorical expressions. The translatability of a source language (SL) metaphor thus depends on the particular cultural experiences it utilizes, and the extent to which these can be reproduced in the TL depends on the degree of the overlap between the two languages and cultures. The term culture includes personal activities, that is, the way individuals think; collective operation and the way people behave or act in society; and finally the way society expresses itself. To investigate and determine the dominant method adopted in translating metaphors in poetry from Persian into English, some 40 metaphors and their translations were randomly selected from The Divan of Hafiz translated by Wilberforce Clarke, and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward FitzGerald. Keywords:culture; English; literary translation; Persian metaphors