Areas of Relevance and Procedures for Translating Culture-Specific Terms from English into Sorani Kurdish

The translation of culture-specific terms between English and Sorani Kurdish can pose significant
challenges caused by major cultural differences between the two societies e.g. the legal systems,
legislation and the influence of religious beliefs and social attitudes. An additional factor is that while
Sorani Kurdish is spoken in the Kurdish region of Iraq, the official language of Iraq is Arabic.
The aim of this study was to attempt to develop a model that would identify ‘areas of relevance’ and
combine this with ‘translation procedures’ to analyse what factors may influence a translator when
s/he is translating culture-specific terms. The theoretical approach of this study is largely based on
Nord’s (1997) multi-level functional approach to translation for the identification of ‘areas of
relevance’ for translating culture-specific terms and on Dickins’ (2012) grid of distinctions in
translation procedures, which is based on an analysis of the translation strategies of Ivir (1987),
Newmark (1981) and Hervey and Higgins (1992).
The model was applied to an English-Kurdish parallel corpus, which comprises four texts chosen for
their potentially culture-specific content and thus their ability to test the use of the model. The analysis
of this application was divided into six parts. The first part is an analysis of four aspects of the TTs,
involving: 1) culture-specific terms in the four texts in the corpus; 2) the proportion of primary,
secondary and other terms and proper words/phrases and common words/phrases and their
relationship to each other and rates of successful translation; 3) the proportion of different translation
techniques used: synonymy, ST hyperonymy – TT hyponymy, ST hyponymy – TT hyperonymy,
(semantic) overlap and other; and 4) the commissioners’ apparent priorities overall and their
relationship to rates of successful translation.
Parts 2-5 are numerical-based analyses of the success of translation, in relation to a) formality, b)
foreignization/domestication, c) i. synonymy, ii. ST hyperonymy – TT hyponymy, iii. ST hyponymy – TT
hyperonymy, iv. semantic) overlap, v. other; and a comparison of all these four sections
The sixth section is an analysis of the translation procedures used to translate the culture-specific
terms. The translation procedures are identified as simple procedures and complex translation
procedures (consisting of a combination of two or simple translation procedures) in each text of the
corpus, with a comparison of each of the texts.
This model, combining the functional approach and Dickins’ model of procedures for translating
culture-specific terms, was shown to work in this study and it contributes to an understanding of the
difficulties facing translators of culture-specific terms and their responses to these difficulties.