Shift

This study focused mainly on the shifts of the grammatical cohesion in texts translated from English into Persian. It aimed to identify the grammatical cohesive devices (GCDs) in ST and TT separately, based on Halliday and Hassn's Model (1976), determine the number of occurrences of GCDs in two texts and finally, illustrate types of shifts of grammatical cohesion and strategies used in TT. To achieve these aims, a mixed-method (comparative and descriptive model) research design was used to spot cohesive shifts in TT due to translation, together with the employed strategies. To this purpose, the book, Oral Reproduction of Stories was investigated, with its translation. 39 different stories by different writers were selected as the sample of analysis. The results showed that the TT adopted all the three types of GCDs except verbal and casual substitution, with verbal substitution in Persian being carried down by reference, ellipsis and lexical cohesion. The occurrence of GCDs in the TT was more frequent than that of ST. Regarding the general analysis of the cohesion shifts, the study showed that three types of shifts (i.e. establishment of new cohesion, elimination of cohesion and change of type of cohesive features) occur in translation. Finally it was revealed that the translation strategies undertaken by the various translators are motivated and influenced by three factors (i. e. systemic language differences Baker (1992), stylistic preferences and the translation process itself (Blum- Kulka, 1986).

Translation is almost always conducted within a certain socio-cultural framework with its particular ideology. In the present study, the application of various shift types in two legal translations was examined to show how socio-cultural and ideological inclinations of the translator affect adequacy and acceptability in translation. Two legal texts in English (the Geneva Interim Agreement and NPT) and their Persian translations released by IRI’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs formed the corpus of the study. The analysis of the translations indicated the lack of ideological and cultural shifts and the presence of structural and stylistic shifts. Legal texts are highly sensitive and need the utmost precision in their translation. These requirements could make ideological and cultural shifts out of the question in legal translation. The results, therefore, suggest that in legal translation training, attention should be devoted to structural and stylistic shifts.  As for the adequacy and acceptability, it was also observed that translated texts cannot be totally adequate or totally acceptable; the poles of adequacy and acceptability are on a continuum, and translators move between these two extremes.

This paper aimsto reveal how the universals of translation (henceforth, UsT) can beregarded as a manner to examine the translator'sstyle in the TL. In doing so, this paper examines how Saleh Hosseini, as an Iranian literary translator,  made his style through the changes he completed at each micro-and macro-levels shift to result in his discursive presence and/or style in the novels he has translated into Persian. After having reviewed the main theories on shifts  including Nida, Catford, Leuven-Zwart, and Baker, this paper takes Baker’s definition of style as the translator’s ‘thumbprint’ as a way to approach the UsT in Hosseini’s Persian translations. Having occurred with the translated texts than with the original, the UsT are: ‘explicitation’, ‘normalization’, ‘levelling out’, and ‘simplification’ (Baker, 1996). Having selected 44 sentences from the three translated novels into Persian by Hosseini as a corpus, this paper indicates that the ratio of ‘normalization’ is much higher than the other three universals, meaning that Hosseini, through adhering to the norms of the Persian language, came to this universal as one of the signposts of his discursive presence, voice, and style in his translations.