Persian Translations through Time: Passive Forms

Abstract

Languages are dynamic and always changing. These changes encompass all aspects of languages. Along with changes in languages, translation changes too. The present paper studies one of these changes in one of the linguistic layers of language: passive forms, in translation of contemporary Persian literary texts. Therefore, the researcher examines translated texts published in different years to find the changes that might have occurred in translation of such structures. The corpus includes literary best sellers of contemporary Persian texts along with their English source text. Regarding the methodology, the researcher extracts passive sentences from the English text and their translations from the Persian texts; then through a comparison among translations of passive structures in different eras, it is determined whether any change has occurred in translation patterns of different years and if so, what kind of change. The findings of this research will be useful in researches on history of translation, linguistics and translation teaching.