A Cross-Linguistic Analysis of English-Persian Commissives and Directives in Of Mice and Men

Abstract

A review of the literature on translation of speech acts indicates a dearth of
empirical research on this area. In order to contribute to this relatively neglected area
of translation, the present study targeted at exploration of translation equivalences
(formal vs. dynamic), directness shifts (between vs. within) and their justifiability. To
this end, three research questions were addressed with respect to the aforementioned
translation equivalents and directness shifts, on the one hand, and the justifiability of
these phenomena, on the other hand. Furthermore, Steinbeck’s (1937) “Of Mice and
Men” was selected as the material of the study. For the sake of manageability, the
scope of the study was limited to two categories of commissives and directives.
Employing Searle’s (1975) speech act theory on the English novel, 120 commissive and
directive speech act utterances were randomly selected. Then, they were analyzed based
on Nida’s (1964) concept of equivalence and Zamani’s (2013) notion of directness
shifts. Next, the aggregated translations were qualitatively assessed based on Zamani’s
(2013) TQA framework, and Rahimi’s (2004) translation theory. Finally, the results of
the study indicated that with respect to the translation equivalence, dynamic equivalents
outnumbered the formal ones, while regarding the directness shifts, the category of
between shifts outnumbered within shifts. The findings of the study further indicated
that about 58.5 percent of the translation equivalents were located in the third level of
translation quality, i.e., successful translation, while with respect to the directness shifts
about 74.5 percent of the two notions were justifiable.