Abstract
The present study aimed at investigating Aixela's (1996) translation strategies employed by M.A. translation students to deal with culture-specific items (CSIs) from English into Persian. Furthermore, the most/least used translation strategies were determined. To achieve this, a translation test consisted of 25 statements, which were extracted from the novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone(Rowling, 1997), was given to 40 M.A. translation students who were selected conveniently and equally divided into the females and males students. The 25 statements encompassed CSIs which were classified based on the Klingberg's (1986) classification of CSIs. As the results indicated, among Aixela's translation strategies, the males M.A. students applied orthographic adaptation, absolute Universalization, naturalization, linguistic translation, intratextual gloss, synonymy, and limited universalization of which orthographic adaptation was the most used and synonymy was the least employed strategies. The females M.A. students employed the same strategies among which orthographic adaptation and intertextual gloss were the most/least used strategies. The independent sample t test was conducted to find out which group of translators was more successful in producing higher quality translations. This led to discover whether the gender had an effect on the translation qualities and on the types of translation strategies. The results of the study showed the effect of the gender of the M.A. students on the translation qualities they produced. The results gave no indication of the effect of the gender on the translation strategies they employed. This study generates some pedagogical implications for translation students and trainee translators, and for those responsible for teaching students and training translators.