Translations of Memoirs of a Geisha Analysis andinsights of Cultural Perspectives.
Memoirs of a geisha' is an astonishing novel by Arthur Golden. The story revolves around a geisha, named Nitta Sayuri or formerly known as Sakamoto Chiyo. This English written novel unlocks the hidden world of Japanese's complex rituals and the text is translated into 32 languages. This article opts to analyses the translation of Japanese's cultural words, e.g. ecology, metaphor, taboo word, etc. into Malay language. Newmark (1998)'s definition and categories of culture are used throughout this article to analyse the novel. Findings indicate that changes do occur due to cultural differences between the two languages. And the cultural translation procedures can be classified into three categories; (i) borrowing or transference procedure, (ii) adaptation between two cultural word, and (iii) description of the cultural word.