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Philosophical and linguistic reflections of Gadamer and Ricoeur on how understanding occurs are of considerable significance. Gadamer’s concept of “Fusion of horizons” and Ricoeur’s idea of “Understanding oneself through the other” are among the most important issues in this regard. These two philosophical issues attempt to gain intercultural understanding. The fact is that the dichotomous strategies and approaches of translation as manifested in Venuti’s foreignization-domestication dichotomy, and other similar theories have been unable to pave the way for mutual understanding between cultures. Employing Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s ideas, this study attempts to tackle the dichotomous issue of translation theories.  Considering the Gadamer’s view that all understanding occurs through language and the Ricoeur’s idea that man enjoys a specific unity despite his great variation, translation is rethought as a linguistic and cultural phenomenon instrumental in creating cultural and linguistic affinity among people and causing a sort of intercultural unity. Therefore, unlike the dichotomous approach of foreignization and domestication, the present study aims to view translation from the view point of philosophical hermeneutics and offer a new approach, which simultaneously considers attention to the two cultures involved in translation and respect for the other culture.

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This paper investigates the Persian writer’s style through domesticating/foreignizing strategies used in two English translations of Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. As the ‘thumbprint’, style is concerned with some recurring patterns of linguistic habits of any writer; hence, any translator. As proposed by Venuti, these strategies may result from various shifts made by translators in transferring the ST style into the TT one. The question is raised: Is there any relationship between the translator’s style and the used strategies by the translators? Having reviewed the main literature and strategies, this paper puts into practice the main used strategies in 200 sentences chosen randomly from each English translation of the novel, related to the given categories of domestication and foreignization. The results showed that Costello’s translation was dominated by such domesticating strategies as borrowing and extra-lingual gloss; Bashiri’s with foreignizing ones. In both translations, the dominant domesticating strategies are deletion, approximation, and paraphrasing. However, regarding the macro-level structure, keeping or losing the original author’s style has nothing to do with domesticating/foreignizing strategies. In conclusion, it seems perplexing to apply such strategies to the texts translated from non-hegemonic languages such as Persian into hegemonic languages such as English.

 

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Neolithic and food production from domesticated species has been one of the most important topics discussed and studied about prehistoric archaeology. Since the 1920s, or even much earlier, archaeologists tried to explain this great event that changed human life after millions of years of hunting-gathering. During these years, various theories based on technological, environmental, economic and sustenance, demographic, social, and evolutionary and, in recent decades, ideological, have been proposed by researchers. Some believe that Neolithic and food production is not an absolute and sudden process, but a long-term process, from knowing and choosing of species, management, and domestication of interdependence; this process is called Neolithization. The Neolithization process is not just the adoption of a new way of life due to environmental and demographic changes, but the beginning of human mental and worldviews changes. In this period, human manifests new behaviors, including rituals, which can be seen in burials, handicrafts, and architecture. Placing animal horns (domestic/wild) in the architectural space is one of these ritual behaviors. This symbolic behavior has been found in Fertile Crescent sites, from the Levant in the westernmost to Iran’s easternmost borders. Some researchers believe that this behavior is to gain authority, while some believe that humans tried to use these ways to control the wild in their inner domestic world. In this research, the authors have tried to analyze this type of behavior from the perspective of Neolithization ideological theories.