ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 1, No. 7, pp. 851-860, July 2011 © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.1.7.851-860 © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Translating Political Allusions: A Survey of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce Hussein Pirnajmuddin Department of Foreign Languages, Isfahan University, Isfahan, Iran Email: pirnajmuddin@fgn.ui.ac.ir Leila Niknasab Department of Foreign Languages, Isfahan University, Isfahan, Iran Email: leilaniknasab@yahoo.com Abstract—One of the elements present in almost all literary texts causing intercultural gaps is allusion. This study addresses allusion, as a form of intertextuality, in translation. An attempt has been made to look into the strategies the translators have used in translating into Persian four types of allusive PNs(proper names) and KPs (key-phrases) (religious, political, historical and mythological) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This comparative study is done on the basis of the strategies of translating allusions suggested by Leppihalme (1997) to find whether the Persian translations follow these strategies or not and to find the frequency and efficiency of each strategy. The three Persian translations are by Manouchehr Badi'ei (1380), Parviz Dariush (1370) and Asghar Jooya (1382). The strategy of ‘retention of the given name’ was of the highest and ‘omission’ of the lowest frequency in the translations studied. Badi’ei’s translation proved to be the most attentive to allusions and the most successful in rendering them. Index Terms—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, allusion, intertextuality, text, translation strategies I. INTRODUCTION Cultural terms are not problematic only when they are related to cultures too far from each other; unlike what might be conceived even if two cultures involved are not very different, translators might experience many problems. The number of problems arising due to cultural differences is greater than that of semantic or syntactic ones. Discussing different problems which translators face, Leppihalme (1997) puts them in two categories of extra-linguistic and intra- linguistic problems. Extra linguistic problems are often expressed as lexical problems and culture–bound translation problems are mainly intra linguistic and pragmatic (involving idiom, pun, wordplay, etc.). Allusions also belong to the second category. She adds that "the words of allusion function as a clue to the meaning, but the meaning can usually be understood only if the receiver can connect the clue with an earlier use of the same or similar words in another source or the use of a name evokes the referent and some characteristic features linked to the name" (p.4). Wheeler (1979) postulates that allusions have a role in explaining the meaning of different texts; moreover, the use of allusions is also an indicator of style. It should be taken into consideration that in literature readers often find that writers quote the works of others. “In most readers' mind, however, quotations and references, the two basic types of allusion, are usually lumped together with such things as book illustrations, chapter titles, and arguments which head chapters or cantos, all of which are ignored too easily or dismissed as virtually redundant elements of a literary text” (ibid, p.10). Montgomery (2007) mentions the most common way of one text's alluding to other texts as follows: 1. Through a verbal reference to another text “O, come all you Roman Catholics That never went to mass” (A Portrait, p.30). "Come All You Roman Catholics" This song is probably one of the class of comic songs in Ireland known as "Come all ye's" which start with the phrase, "Come all ye (you)." 2. Through „epigraphs‟ (at the beginning of the text some words are inscribed). 3. Through names of characters. There are allusions behind the following names used in different literary works: Scrooge, a name for a miser; Samson or Herculus, a strong man, Venus, etc. (Delahunty, et al., 2001). 4. Through choice of titles. (As Riquelme (2006) mentions readers of A Portrait aware of the recent history of Irish writing would probably have an echo of Oscar Wild (1856-1900) in Joyce's title). When talking about allusion, theorists mention other relevant terms which are necessary to be introduced to get the meaning of allusion, its forms, functions, and its role, etc. in the world of literature. One of these terms is intertextuality. Intertextuality is often used as an umberella term which is used to cover different ways in which other terms get their