Applicability of Newmark’s Procedures to Translation of Religious Cultural Elements from English into Persian

This paper aimed to investigate the differences between English and Persian religious elements which may be problematic in translating from English into Persian. The study aimed also to investigate the way cultural elements in general and religious ones in particular were dealt with in the selected corpora and to check whether the procedures proposed by Newmark, were sufficient and adequate for translation of these elements from English into Persian. One book The Pilgrim’s Progress by J. Bunyan and its corresponding translated Persian version were analyzed. This paper was mostly narrowed down to religious cultural elements. The findings indicated that there was no evidence to show a consistent effort on the part of translator to use any particular translation approach in the process of achieving adequate translation. The findings showed that procedures suggested by Newmark have accounted well for the transfer of cultural as well as religious elements; it was observed that Newmark’s range of procedures was comprehensive and worked well nearly for cultural elements included in the selected corpuses.