The Societal History of Translation in Iran: the Relation between the Cultural History of Iran and its Historical Culture

In this article, we declare the preliminary approaches of translation in Iran's history, includes some results of a research about translation trends in Iran’s cultural history, in order to understand any probable relation between the assumed approaches and the socio-cultural changes, in which there is two major historical periods, the ancient Iran and the Islamic cultural period. Then the probable relation between translation approaches and socio-cultural changes has been considered and conceptually used as an index for understanding the social functions of translation in those periods, and also finding out any socio-historical role of translation in the cultural history of Iran. The concept of “translation” in this article has been used in two different, but related conceptual meaning: the first one considers translation as the process of rendering words or texts from one language into another, the second approaches includes any reading and re-reading of a culture by another culture, as an intercultural process. Methodologically, older periods have been studied by pursuing the relations between transitional engravings, scripts and monuments. The newer periods have been studied through historical reports. The final conclusion proposes two different functions of translation; it seems that translation in the ancient period is an inner cultural trait; and in the Islamic era seems to function more as a “necessity for intercultural communications”, and also as a way to provide basic needs for constructing a trans-cultural society.