azita afrashi; tahere hemmati
Volume 7, Issue 13 , September 2015, , Pages 109-134
Abstract
1-Introduction
Languages employ different strategies to represent motion as one of the basic human cognitive abilities. In Talmy's typological dichotomy (1991; 2000b) languages are of two types according to the way they represent path either in verb roots or in satellites, accordingly languages are ...
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1-Introduction
Languages employ different strategies to represent motion as one of the basic human cognitive abilities. In Talmy's typological dichotomy (1991; 2000b) languages are of two types according to the way they represent path either in verb roots or in satellites, accordingly languages are either verb framed or satellite framed. Slobin (1991;1996 a,b.1997;2000) performed corpus based and cross-linguistic studies to examine the representation of motion events and their translation strategies in different languages, thus he revised the Talmy's typological dichotomy(1991;2000b) and showed the significance of corpus based methods in the study of motion events and their translation strategies from the source to target language. Verb framed and satellite framed languages show varieties in the representation of path in the process of translation (Slobin 1996a; in Ibarretxe - Antuñano 2003;153).
2- Methodology
The present study is quantitative in nature. The research data is derived from the chapter six of Hobbit (1937) and its translation into Persian (Alizadeh 2004 ). It is worth mentioning that in the existing researches regarding the translation of motion events, the same chapter from the above mentioned novel are analyzed for two reasons, first for the considerable array of motion events represented in this text and second for the possibility of cross linguistic analyzes made possible. The theoretical frame work adopted in the present paper is based on Slobin(1991;1996a,b.1997;2000). Thus 175 sentences from the source and target texts were analyzed in which path features were represented.
3- Discussion
Adopting a corpus based and cross linguistic approach to the study of motion events and their representations in languages not only shows the differences and similarities of the conceptualization of motion in languages but also unveils the translation strategies adopted during the process of translating motion concepts from source to target language. In this research we examined how the translation strategies of path proposed by Slobin (1991;1996 a,b.1997;2000) justify the representation of path in the translation from English to Persian. Accordingly we found that the P 1(the deletion of certain path elements ), P2(the insertion of a new path verb) and P3(statement of all the information of path ) are used both in English and Persian. The present paper introduced two new strategies here named P 4(the substitution of a path verb by another motion verb) and P 5(the substitution of a path verb by a manner verb ). The strategies P6 (translating a different type of path) and P 7(the extension of information regarding path) has been previously suggested in Ibarretxe- Antuñano 2003.
4- Conclusion
In this research the frequency of occurrence of the translation strategies of path mentioned in section3 are as follows:
P1: 10/28% ; P2: 13/71% ; P3: 66/28% ; P4: 0/57% ; P5: 0/57% ; P6: 5/14% ; P7: 4/57%.
As it is obvious, the P3 strategy shows a considerable distribution compared with other strategies. Therefore the translation of all the information of path in motion events has had prevalence over other path translation strategies.
Key words:
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