The study of cleft structures in the translation of texts from French into Persian in the framework of information structure theory

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• MOZHGAN SOGHANI ¹
• Bahram Modarresi ²
• Hamid Reza Shairi ³

¹ FOREIGN LANGUAGES, FACULTY OF LITERATURE, , HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

² Department of linguistics, Faculty of Foreign languages, Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran

³ Department of French Language, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

10.22067/rltf.2021.71316.1019

Abstract

This research is the case study of cleft structures in the translation of texts from French into Persian in the framework of Lambrecht’s information structure theory (1996). The study has been conducted on cleft sentences of six books in French and their translations in Persian. In this descriptive-analytic research, the cleft structures in French texts have been identified and compared with their equivalents in Persian translations. Then, the collected data have been classified separately based on Lambrecht’s information structure theory and the topic-focus relations. This research investigates semantic-pragmatic differences as well as distribution of new-old information in each case in the source language and the translation into the target language. The results of this study indicate that despite the possibility of using cleft structures in both languages, 58% of cleft sentences in French have been rendered into Persian non-cleft structures and only 42% of cleft sentences have been translated as clefts in Persian. Moreover, in the study of non-cleft translated sentences in Persian, 70% and 30% of the clefted constituents have occupied the topic and the non-topic positions respectively. In addition, by providing examples from the research data, it has been shown that the argument focus in cleft structures has been changed into predicate focus or sentence focus due to the shift of the syntactic structure, and as a result, the emphatic meaning of these sentences in the target language has been lost.

Keywords

• Clefting
• Information Structure
• Translation
• Focus relations
• Topic

Main Subjects

• french translation

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