Translating Personal Deixis as Point of View Indexes in Three Persian Translations of Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Abstract

This paper examines translation of personal deixis in three Persian translations of To the Lighthouse. Firstly, the theoretical framework and the related literature are reviewed. In fact, as a means for determining spatio-temporal point of view in narrative fiction and for revealing the relationship between characters’ utterances and their point of view, deixis shows whether narrator's or characters’ perspectives are realized in the story or not. Secondly, translation of personal deixis of To the Lighthouse is examined by comparing and contrasting the original with selected samples of its three translations into Persian. Finally, it is discussed that by reducing the narrator’s and characters’ duet to a single voice, Hosseini has translated indirect discourse into direct discourse (80%) while the two other translators have preserved the quality of the original discourse.