Exploring the Tendency towards Nominal Style in Persian Non-Literary Translated Texts

مطالعات زبان و ترجمه

Article 1, Volume 47, Issue 1, April 2014, Pages 1-17   

Document Type: Research Article

DOI: 10.22067/lts.v47i1.42874

Authors

Elnaz Pakar^* ; Ali Khazaee Farid

Department of English, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran

Abstract

Over the past one hundred and fifty years, due to a huge number of translations from different languages into Persian, certain norms of language use have changed and certain others are in the process of changing. As one of the most frequent syntactic properties of most languages, especially English, the nominal style is a most likely candidate for transfer through translation into Persian, a language in which the use of the verbal style is admittedly more dominant. This research addresses the following question: since literalism is the prevailing translation method in Iran, is there a tendency towards the nominal style in non-literary translated texts? To this end, two large corpora of translated and original Persian texts of expository nature were selected. The former group consisted of translations done by both famous and not very famous translators. The purpose of examining the translations was to find out which style was dominant: nominal or verbal. A comparison of the corpora showed that in original Persian books as well as translated books done by well-known translators, there was a tendency toward the verbal style as the number of nominal sentences found in these books was very low. But in the texts translated by not very famous translators, the number of nominal sentences was significantly higher than the number of verbal sentences.

Keywords

Nominalization; Nominal Sentence; Verbal Sentence; Nominal Style; Verbal Style

References