Psychological POV through Modality System in Three Persian Translations of Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which the three translators have rendered psychological ‘point of view’ (PPOV) in their Persian translations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (TTL) through ‘modality’ system under so-called ‘translational narratology’ (TN). Having collected data manually rather than electronically from the forty five pages of the three parts of Woolf’s novel and its three Persian translations as a mini-corpus, this paper examines some frequent modals as ‘must’, ‘should’, ‘could’, and ‘might’ as the linguistic markers of PPOV through the modality system of English and Persian. With regard to ‘could’ as modality,the results show that the three Persian translators have tried, though through different Persian lexicon of ‘tavân’ and ‘shodan’, to translate ‘could’. As for 'must' as a deontic modal, Persian ‘bâyad’ plays an important role in the Persian language.In this sense, modality as qualifying the speaker’s statement or opinion has changed to an aspect expressing the habituality and the continuity of the action. The immediate result is that such changes if repeating frequently all through the translation, may affect the overall meaning of the text at the macro-level.