FROM TEXT TO ENDNOTES: CULTURAL MEDIATION IN RENDERING SHIRAZI CULTURE SPECIFIC ITEMS FROM PERSIAN INTO ARABIC IN SADEGH HEDAYAT’S “DASH AKOL”-A CRITICAL STUDY OF SALIM HAMDAN’S TRANSLATION IN LIGHT OF AIXELÁ’S STRATEGIES

Abstract

This study examines how cultural mediation is distributed between the translated narrative and its endnotes in Salim Hamdan’s Arabic translation of Sadegh Hedayat’s “Dash Akol.” It argues that Shirazi specificity is transferred through a two-layered architecture: the main text negotiates Arabic readability, while the paratext restores cultural knowledge that the narrative flow cannot easily accommodate. Using a descriptive, analytical, and comparative method, the study aligns the complete Persian story with the Arabic version published in Al-Adab al-Ajnabiyya in 2003. Fifty-six highly salient culture-specific items (CSIs) were identified. Each item was coded for one primary textual procedure within Aixelá’s taxonomy, while the presence of extratextual glossing was recorded separately. A qualitative assessment considered semantic accuracy, cultural load, narrative function, Arabic acceptability, and consistency. Orthographic adaptation was the most frequent textual procedure (30.4%), followed by linguistic translation (23.2%), absolute universalization and naturalization (16.1% each), intratextual gloss (8.9%), limited universalization (3.6%), and deletion (1.8%). At the level of the main text, conservation procedures accounted for 62.5% of the data, compared with 37.5% for substitution. When endnotes were counted as additional procedures, conservation rose to 72.4%. Nineteen cultural notes explain twenty CSIs, in addition to one biographical note on the author. The translation succeeds in several functional naturalizations and in explaining objects related to architecture, clothing, weapons, and ritual life. Yet it also displays opaque literalism, inconsistent transliteration, cultural generalization, and the deletion of an embodied fantasy passage from the published Arabic text. The study concludes that Hamdan’s method constitutes selective conservation supported by paratext: foreignness is not simply retained or erased, but strategically displaced from the narrative line to an explanatory threshold that actively shapes the Arabic reader’s image of Shiraz.