An investigation into the use of Catford's shifts in translating short stories: translating english grammatical sentences into persian in focus

Abstract

The present study investigated the use of Catford's shifts in the Persian translation. To achieve the research objectives, the researcher used a qualitative research design to examine Catford’s Translation Shifts category (1965). The research corpus was 50 English sentences of Introductory Steps to Understanding book and its Persian translation by 100 elementary EFL learners. The findings showed that shift structure, unit shift, class shift, and in-system shifts were used by learners. Also, the most shift used by learners was a structural shift. The findings achieved in this study indicated the applicability of shifts in translating grammatical sentences in Persian. Due to the complexity and variety of languages and their structure, the role of translation is very important. The researcher tried to prove that although education in the SL can be practical, finding equivalences for the grammatical sentences will complete it.