Translational Versus Non-Translational Persian: A Corpus-Based Study of Children’s Literature

Abstract

The introduction of corpora into Translation studies is relatively new with the first corpus-based translation research carried out in the 1990s. It waswhen translation researchers started to use the quantitative data provided by language corpora to formulate hypotheses aboutsimilarities across all translated texts. The present research sets out to investigate into thesimilarities and differences between translational and non-translational Persian children’s literature. To this end, a small monolingual comparable corpus of Persian children’s literature comprising 53,208 words of translational and 53,715 words of non-translational prose fiction books is compiled. The researchers then use both quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods to explore into the differences between translational and non-translational Persian children’s literature. The results areinterpreted in the light of Baker’s universals of translation and Toury’s law of interference. Our data supported Baker’s universals of translation as well as Toury’s law of interference in the context under study.