Challenges Posed by Religious-bound Terms while Rendering Classical Persian Literature: English Translations of Sa‘di’s Gulistan in Focus

Abstract

The present study concentrates on Sa‘di’s Gulistan and its two English translations by Burton (1888) and Eastwick (1880) to explore the way they coped with challenging religious-bound terms. The Gulistan, abounding with RBTs, is a world-renown literary-religious masterpiece. Ivir’s (2003) taxonomy was employed as the model of the study. Findings revealed that the categories of ‘concrete religious concepts’, ‘proper names’, ‘religious verdicts’ and ‘abstract religious concepts’ posed great challenges to translators. It was also found that while most of the RBTs were rendered via the use of ‘substitution’ and ‘definition’ (84%), ‘lexical creation’ was never used by any translator. © 2022 Slovak Association for the Study of English. All rights reserved.