A Product-oriented Approach to Units of Translation in Iranian English-Persian Literary Translations

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The notion of ‘unit of translation’ as a challenging issue in
Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) is addressed. Considering
this notion from a product-oriented point of view as “the TT unit
that can be mapped onto a ST unit” (Baker 2001: 286), the main
concern here is to investigate a hierarchy of units of translation
(UTs) proposed by Newmark (1991: 66-68) including word, phrase,
clause, sentence, and paragraph in the literary translations. At the
preliminary stage, two questions were raised to detect the most
frequent UT adopted by the professional literary translators, and to
explore the relationship between the UTs and the free-literal
dichotomy in terms of the occurrence of unit/rank shifts. To this end,
a corpus of three famous English novels (originally written in
English by the renowned authors) and two best-selling translations
of each (done by professional translators) were chosen to be
analyzed. Through a contrastive analysis, two hundred and ten
coupled pairs of ST-TT segments were extracted from the first ten
pages of each novel and its two translations based on establishing
relations of equivalence between the ST-TT segments and adopting
sentence as the major unit of analysis. The UTs adopted in the STTT
segments were then identified. The obtained results of the UT categories demonstrated that the most frequent UT adopted by the
professional literary translators was sentence. The unit-shifts
applied in the UTs were also signified. The statistical calculation of
frequency of unit-shifts in each translator's UTs proved that the
more frequent is the occurrence of unit-shifts in the UTs of the
translator, the more deviated is his translation from the formal
correspondence, the more different the size of his UTs is, and finally
the freer his translation will be.

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