Persian Translation

Thematic progression pattern as the method of development of the text ensures that the reader follows the right path in understanding the text; in this regard, this subject is attracting considerable interest among discourse analysts. This paper calls into question the status of thematic progression in the process of translating English news into Persian. With this in mind, we analyzed the thematic progression patterns of a total of 643 T-units of English news along with their Persian translated version employing Daneš and McCabe progression patterns. The results of the Chi-square analysis revealed there was not a significant difference between the progression patterns in English and Persian except for the simple linear pattern. Nevertheless, there were some structural changes resulting in the alterations in progression patterns: Adding the theme that pushes the theme to the rheme, changing the postpositioned declaratives, omitting expletives, dislocating the theme in the T-unit and others. In spite of having linguistically motivated and unmotivated alterations, we also found that Persian translation seems to retain the progression pattern of the English news texts.

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.