On the Untranslatability of Cultural Aspects of Myth: An Investigation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

Abstract

This study aims to explore the strategies which Persian translators of English myth works have adopted in dealing with cultural aspects. In addition, this study scrutinizes the culture-related problems which have led to untranslatability in myth translation. The analyzed parts were extracted from the first book of The Lord of the Rings (2012) by Tolkien and its two Persian translations by Alizadeh (2003) and Amini (2004). This comparative analysis was done based on the characteristics of adequate translation proposed by Newmark (1998) and Baker (1992), and also adequate discoursal translation components proposed by Lotfipour (2015). The most attention is on the translating of proper names, the genre of the work, and the author’s style about the cultural dimension of the work. The results revealed that the cultural knowledge of the translator about myth, origins, and features, affects the adequacy of translation. In addition, the main finding of this study proved that certain factors influence the translator’s performance to produce an adequate myth translation.