On Fronted Themes in Translation of Dramatic Texts into Persian: A Corpus-based Study of Markedness in Translation

Abstract

Conducted within the comparative research model in translation studies, the present work is a descriptive-analytical corpus-based study addressing the translation of fronted themes, as the main category of marked structures, from English into Persian. The corpus built for the purpose of this study is a parallel one comprising 3500 English sentences appearing in two plays by Arthur Miller along with their Persian translations. Having studied all these sentences, a total of 145 marked (NCWO) items were spotted out of which 98 ones were instances of fronted themes. These were extracted along with their Persian counterparts and were further classified into three sub-categories of fronted time/place adjuncts, fronted objects/complements, and fronted predicators. Comparative analyses of these items and their Persian renditions revealed that about 61% of all the fronted themes had been translated into marked Persian sentences while nearly 38% had unmarked renditions, and a negligible 1% had been left untranslated. However, the overall results by no means represent the ratio of marked translations-unmarked translations within this category of marked structures since there are drastic variations in the results pertaining to markedness correspondence in translation of different sub-categories of fronted themes. These sub-categories and their variations are discussed at length separately. The results and discussions presented show how important it is to handle markedness phenomena carefully in translation and how the translators' failure to do so can result in translations which are propositionally similar but communicatively different.