Shifts in Cohesive Devices of the Source Text and its Impact on Translation: The Case of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

The present research was an attempt to identify shifts of cohesion in target texts based on a contrastive analysis between an original English novel, namely, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and its two Persian translations. The study analyzes the consequences of such shifts at levels of explicitness of the TTs and identifies the likely changes in the universe of discourse of the ST in case the lexical cohesion is manipulated. The main approach adopted in the study has been that of Halliday and Hasan (1976) to identify cohesive ties in the categories of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion in the ST. The methodological and theoretical framework to study the consequences of shifts of cohesion on the TTs has been that of Blum-Kulka (1986). The results indicate that there are differences among the five categories of cohesive devices in terms of the level of explicitness. On average, ellipsis, substitution, lexical cohesion, conjunction, and reference had the highest to lowest levels of textual explicitness, respectively. The results further indicate that changes in the universe of discourse of the ST due to manipulation of lexical cohesions could result in higher levels of textual explicitness.