Variability of Grammatical Features of Persian Translations by Translators’ Gender

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate whether there is a meaningful relationship between translators' gender and their translations in terms of such grammatical features as mechanics (misspellings and punctuation), syntax (voice, tense and aspect of verbs), and lexis (SL intrusion and sexually-explicit terms) based on the proposed model, called translation performance with grammatical, textual and sociolinguistic branches. For that reason, the same sample English text was imparted to both female and male translators to be rendered into Persian to ascertain if they vary linguistically, and if they do so, what areas are more frequently different. The sociolinguistic factors as well as textual dimensions of the language were not scrutinized in the study. The participants were 30 male and 30 female undergraduate senior students of English at three universities in Qom, Iran. These 60 participants were selected out of 150 students who scored as high as 6 in the IELTS given to them and showed their English proficiency. By analyzing the data elicited descriptively from each translation, primarily, via t test; only 3 out of 15, variables demonstrated a significant difference between translations made by both genders contributing to the research. Thus, although these 3 variables verify the meaningful relationship between translator's gender and their translation performance, these elements are not enough to indicate that the grammar of translations is significantly different.