Markedness Correspondence in Translation of Books’ Titles

Abstract

Translation is a multi-dimensional task which requires different aspects of competencies one of which is linguistics. Falling within the realm of linguistic competence is the ability to produce relatively similar degree of markedness throughout the translation. Such ability contributes to keep the thematic structure of sentences intact and make the same propositional meanings have different communicative meanings. The present study which is a descriptive analytical corpus-based one aimed to analyze the thematic structure of titles of all English books rendered into Persian from the beginning of translation in Iran to 2004drawing on Hallidayan linguistic taxonomy of marked sentences as proposed by Baker (1992). The corpus is a parallel one consisting of 141 marked English book titles and their Persian translations. Comparative analyses of items revealed that about 56.7% of all marked English sentences havebeen translated into marked Persian sentences, i.e. the thematic structure of ST has been preserved. The similar thematic structure entails corresponding communicative meaning of STand TT. Keywords: Translation, Information structure (IS), Theme/Rheme, Markedness