Translation and Cultural Memory in Roald Dahl’s Books of Childhood

Even though the translation scholars talk of the intersection of the translation and memory they do not highlight the process of translation in their works (Bodozki 2007; Simon 2011; and Brownlie 2016). To focus on the influence of the process of translation this paper is to test Astrid Erll’s cultural memory model in four children’s books of Roald Dahl’s translated into Persian by four translators in three different publishing houses in order to analyze how the inter relation of social, mental and material dimensions could (re) construct the cultural memory of a generation. For the investigation of the three dimensions George Kelly’s Repertory Grid Technique (RepGrid) as well as Peeter Torop’s cultural translatability parameters of language, text and work are used as an instrument. From the elicitation of the grids and the textual analysis of the data the paper finds out the iteration of the readers’ schemata, the translators’ retranslations and publishers’ republications as well as the large amount of translated texts happening through the process of translation have turned Dahl and his four children’s fantasy fictions into a symbol and symbolic texts and these symbolic texts have solidified the cultural memory of generations about him and his children’s books.