Spatio-Temporal Deixis as the Signpost of Point of View in Three Persian Translations of Woolf’s To ‎the Lighthouse

Abstract

This paper examines spatio-temporal deixis as the signpost of point of view technique in three ‎Persian translations of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In this regard, some challenging questions are ‎raised: what happens generally when point of view is translated into the target language and ‎culture? Due to the linguistic differences of the two languages of Persian and English, how is it ‎possible for a translator to keep or change such items as deictic expressions? Does any change of ‎deixis in the process of translating, affect the whole text and hence, the social and ideological ‎position of the original text? To answer these questions, this paper, having reviewed the main ‎literature on the topic, tries to propose a linguistic and stylistic methodology for studying ‘point of ‎view/focalization’ in both original and translation through the main narratological typologies, ‎Uspensky’s among others. Having taken some deictic expressions as “now”, “then”, and “here” as ‎examples, the paper comes to this conclusion that the three Persian translators have acted in the ‎same vein, although they have chosen different equivalents for the same deixis in different ‎sections of the novel. However, the challenge lies in the way in which the translators have dealt ‎with these deictic expressions.‎