Abstract:
This study was an attempt to investigate the realization of Catford’s shifts in the Farsi translation of English psychology texts, from a product- oriented point of view, shedding light on the areas where Farsi is different from English. Inspired by a study conducted by Khorshidi (2010), the two questions raised in the study sought to detect the kinds of shifts applied in the translation of English psychology texts according to Catford’s theory, and to explore the most frequently used shifts in those texts which include the normal aspects of Farsi psychology texts. To this end, five books on psychology (originally written in English) and their Farsi translations were chosen and a total of six chapters were selected randomly for the analysis. Through a contrastive analysis, 307 coupled pairs of source text and target text segments were detected and extracted from these six chapters and thence tabulated and analyzed, being observed as instances of the realization of Catford’s model of shifts. The obtained results of the corpora demonstrated that all types of shifts were used in the translation of psychology texts from English into Farsi according to Catford’s theory. Furthermore, the results proved that structural shifts were the most frequently employed kinds of shifts.
Machine summary:
"JELS, Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring 2010, 79-90 IAUCTB Applying Catford’s Shifts to the Farsi Translation of Psychology Texts Hossein Vossoughi Professor of Applied Linguistics, Teacher Education University, Tehran, Iran Farhad Pourebrahim MA in Translation Studies, Islamic Azad University Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran Abstract Keywords: Introduction The term translation can inspire different meanings and connotations.
Corpus In order to collect samples suitable for this research to provide the necessary data and to find out what kinds of shifts would be applied in the translation of psychology texts from English to Farsi, the researchers selected samples based on a simple random sampling.
The main purpose of this study, as noted earlier, was first to identify and introduce the types of shifts that are used in the Farsi translation of English psychology texts according to Catford‟s model and to discover which of them were used most frequently in such translations.
4 Unit Class Level shifts Figure 1 – Percentage of translation shift The researchers‟ interpretation of the obtained results of this study is that in the translation of English psychology texts, Iranian translators demonstrate a considerably higher tendency toward category shifts compared to level shifts as only three out of the 307 examples were level shifts and the rest were category shifts.
The 88 JELS, Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring 2010, 79-90 results may introduce some usable hints on the application of the most frequent kinds of shifts in translation from English to Farsi for university students majoring in translation studies."