Function and translation of the thetical you know: a parallel corpus-based investigation of English and Persian

Abstract

Discourse markers, as the elements which serve to establish writer-reader/speaker-audience interaction, can be multi-functional. Considering the multi-functionality of discourse markers, this study will analyse the discourse marker you know in terms of its translation and function in an English–Persian context. For this purpose, the Mizan parallel corpus of English–Persian languages (13,596,676 tokens) was used. Alongside the parallel corpus, a second Persian corpus, the Bijankhan Corpus (68,560,954 words), was used as the reference corpus against which translations and functions were compared. From amongst the 5,349 tokens of you know in the English corpus, 991 were thetical. The analysis of the corpora indicated that the thetical you know had fourteen functions in English, while its counterpart miduni (‘you know’) in Persian had sixteen. From among the functions, claiming acceptance, introducing explanations and giving shared knowledge were the most prevalent in the parallel corpus, whereas in the reference corpus, claiming acceptance, giving shared knowledge and softening the force of an utterance were the most common functions. Close reading of the corpus demonstrated that the functions of the discourse marker you know remained unchanged in translation due to its context-dependency. In addition, there appeared to be six different translation strategies in transferring discourse markers. We hope that the results of this study have useful implications for researchers in such areas as comparative linguistics, translation studies and corpus linguistics.