Translation or “Transgression” ? An Analysis of Caroline Croskery’s Translation Approach to “the Date Palm”

For the first time, utilizing a critical perspective, this study attemped to determine how a translator’s unconscious transgression from their claimed approach can turn a work of translation into a masterpiece. In fact, in this paper, we analyzed culture-bound equivalences in the book “the Date Palm”, which is the English translation of the Persian book “نخل” (Nakhl), written by Hooshang Moradi Kermani (1979). The book was translated by Caroline Croskery in 2017. Culture-bound items were gathered from the English book and were compared and contrasted with their Persian equivalents in order to reveal the tendency of the translator. The comparison is based on the findings of Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958;1995) framework. Findings revealed that in contrast to Croskery’s claim about her fixed source-oriented approach in translation, frequent shifts between source-oriented and target-oriented approaches were observed. Furthermore, it was found that the very shifts resulted in a strong translation. This implies that one cannot judge a translation merely based on the approach claimed by its translator. In addition, it can be concluded that relying on only one approach (only target-oriented or source-oriented) does not lead to a translation masterpiece like “the Date Palm”.