Translationese in Novels Translated from English into Persian

Abstract

The present study was designed to examine the effect of translationese on the target texts. To reach this aim, the study relied on the two Persian translations of the three English novels, ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, and ‘Pride and Prejudice’, which were translated respectively under the titles, ‘ جین ایر’, ‘ بلندیهای بادگیر ’, and ‘ غرور و تعصب ’. In the first phase of the study, the investigator, based on Mollanazar’s (1990) model, randomly collected fifty English sentences with their two translations. In the second phase, the collected sentences were given in the format of a test to twenty undergraduate M.A. Students of translation studies at Allameh Tabataba’i University who were expected to indentify translationese, based on their linguistic knowledge, in any of the two target texts; and to underline the parts they found as translationese. The results of the research showed that translationese led to having difficulty of understanding and reading the target texts and unnaturalness. furthermore, as far as the percentage of translationese in 50 sentences are concerned, Reza Rezaee had performed better in his three translations of the respective novels which were also translated by Mehdi Afshar, Ali Asghar Bahram Beigi, and Shahrokh Pooranfar.