Critical Translation Analysis: A Corpus-Driven Diachronic Analysis of Gendered Discourse in English-Persian Literary Prose Translation

Abstract

This research project interrogates translators’ decision-making when rendering ATTITUDINAL expressions, including emotions and evaluations, related to female characters in a corpus of Persian literary prose translation. Expressions of attitude are some of the most ideologically and socio-culturally loaded kinds of utterances that reveal translators’ point of view of characters and events. This study addresses the question of representation of female characters in an ad-hoc Wuthering Heights English-Persian parallel (WHEP) corpus composed of twenty-one selected Persian translations of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in the context of Iran before and after the Revolution. Proposing what I call a Critical Translation Analysis (CTA) model, I argue that a translator’s decisions are shadowed and influenced by attitudinal stances prevailing in the socio-cultural conditions under which translators are working. The CTA model relies on a corpus-driven content analysis methodology to identify and understand regular patterns of translators’ practices. The model is operationalized by linking three dimensions of corpus analysis: corpus preprocessing, corpus processing, and corpus post-processing. The corpus pre-processing level takes into account compilation of an annotated corpus with NLP tools and concordancer software. At the corpus processing level, textual features in the corpus are annotated based on my adapted version of Appraisal Theory developed by Martin and White (2005). Also, paratextual features are analysed separately as a discrete corpus of book covers. At the post-processing level, quantitative data is derived using SPSS and organized to interpret the features of predominant translation practices used to aggregate, mitigate, or maintain positive, neutral, or negative impressions of ATTITUDINAL utterances in meta-texts (Persian translations). Analysing the statistical data relating to conformity or deviations within the corpus of translated texts and between proto-text and translated texts, I developed and tested five hypotheses regarding the scope and range of translators’ practices when rendering Wuthering Heights. The results showed that Persian translators boosted Wuthering Heights’ female characters’ sadness, criticised their behaviour, and depreciated their status in the Persian versions more than Brontë did in her English text. While female translators tend to modify the semantic and discoursal meaning of ATTITUDINAL expressions, male translators, particularly those working before the Revolution, omit the ATTITUDINAL expression entirely or partially in the Persian versions of Wuthering Heights.