English Present Participles and Their Equivalents in Persian

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to find out whether English Present participles change in the process of translation into Persian. The material for the study was collected from the book, 'Animal Farm', written by George Orwell (1990) and its three translations into Persian. Based on the content or text analysis, the researcher could determine different grammatical structures in Persian for English present participles. Of this storybook, 10 complex sentences containing present participles were selected from each chapter. These English structures were analyzed based on Catford's model (1965) of shifts in translation. Then, the frequencies and percentages were estimated and represented in figures 1, 2 and 3. The grammatical structures in Persian were distributed such that Persian verb structures had the most (40%), and implications and phrases (3%) the least frequencies. The other grammatical structures such as clauses or adverbs obtained different levels of frequencies among the frequencies of the above mentioned structures. This paper provides other researchers an insight into translating these structures from English to Persian or other languages through analyzing the methods by which we can relate these structures to their translations; furthermore, the researcher can develop the methods for other grammatical structures.