A Linguistic Study on the Translation of Parvin E’tesami’s Poems into English Using Catford’s Category Shifts

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate the translation into English by Alaeddin Pazargadi of Parvin E'tesami's poems; in particular, it attempted to analyze the structural elements such as verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections in them. Considering the relationship between Linguistics and Translation Studies, the theoretical framework chosen was that by Catford (1965) whose category shifts which are of a linguistic nature concentrate on the text constituents such as clause, phrase, and word. The main objectives of this paper were to determine what kinds of category shifts were mostly utilized by the translator, and, using linguistic-oriented approaches to translation, to shed more light on the source text (ST) structures. To this aim, the qualitative and quantitative methodologies of research were used. The analyses indicated that, amongst the 14 selected couplets, unit shifts had the most frequency while structure shifts were the least frequent category shifts used in the act of translation.