Translating British Culture to Kurdish Immigrants: Domestication or Foreignization?

Translating culturally specific terms and expressions is often perceived as a challenging practice. This paper explores translating English cultural terms to Kurdish immigrants in the context of the UK public services. The UK government provides information related to public services in different languages for different immigrant communities living in the UK. The information can be in the form of reports, leaflets, brochures, etc., which are produced in different settings such as courts, local councils, hospitals, and so on. Dozens of English-Kurdish translators render such materials to members of the Kurdish community who do not have a good command of English. Following Venuti’s (1995/2008) theory of domestication and foreignization, the paper attempts to identify whether translators adopt a domesticating or a foreignizing strategy when rendering cultural terms found in UK public service materials from English into Kurdish (Sorani). The results reveal that translators use a mixture of both strategies; however, they opt for domestication in the majority of instances. The results also show a lack of consistency in implementing cultural translation procedures among the translators, which points to a need for translation training courses that offer guidelines regarding consistent use of terminology in translating culturally specific terms from English into Kurdish.