Investigating Literary Translator’s Style in Span of Time: The Case of Sa‘di’s Gulistan Translated into English

Abstract Stylistic issues have typically been considered as a challenge for literary translators. As far as literary style is concerned, Sa’di (1208–1291) is the most famous Persian poet. The present study aims at investigating the effect of time on the universals appeared in translating Sa’di’s style in the Gulistan. The corpus of the study consisted of the Gulistan’s two English translations: one by Rehatsek (1888) and its 2010 edition by Rosenbaum, and the other by Newman (2004). Baker’s (1996) framework, consisting of simplification, explicitation, normalization, and leveling out, was used as the basis for analyzing the collected data. As far as stylistic issues were concerned, it was realized that Rehatsek’s translation and its new edition by Rosenbaum, were not distinctly different. It was also found that the passage of time has had effects on selecting some specific features more than the others. Prosification was the most and leveling out was the least frequently observed features, while normalization and poetrification had never been detected. The findings also revealed greater tendency of recent translators to deviating from the ST author’s style and their stronger inclination towards providing easy-to-understand texts for today’s TT audience.