Deictic shifts and re-contextualization in translation
A case study of English and Persian parallel texts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21201034 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Masoumeh Diyanati (0000-0001-7065-0955, Yasouj University), Mohammad Amouzadeh (0000-0001-8964-7967, University of Isfahan) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 748-771 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Pragmatics and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1878-9714 • E-ISSN: 1878-9722 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/ps.23090.diy |
| OpenAlex | W4405597769 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 42 |
This study investigates the challenges of translating English demonstratives into Persian, with a focus on deictic shifts and their discourse-pragmatic implications. It aims to outline the recontextualization that deictic terms undergo during translation and the role of discourse-pragmatic factors in this process. Utilizing a parallel database of literary and academic texts in English and Persian, all instances of English demonstratives and their Persian counterparts have been identified and compared based on type, form, and quantity. An analysis of 1,849 instances of demonstrative discrepancies reveals two primary types of deictic shifts: (1) genuine shifts, which involve a change in the deictic center due to the translator’s (inter)subjectivity, leading to the re-contextualization of discourse, and (2) non-genuine shifts, where there is no change in the origo . The findings indicate a tendency for genuine shifts to alternate between distal-to-proximal and proximal-to-distal, with a marked preference for distal-to-proximal shifts, attributed to the unmarked nature of proximal deixis in Persian. Furthermore, translators frequently replace pure deictics with impure forms or add deictic terms for clarity, reflecting broader translation strategies aimed at ensuring the definiteness and explicitness of referents
CLARITY · Contextualization · Definiteness · Deixis · Demonstrative · Linguistics · Performative utterance · Persian · Sociology · Third person · Utterance · Chemistry · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism · Translation Studies and Practices
Quaestio and L-perspectivation
Demonstratives
Memes of Translation
Recontextualization of News Discourse
Natural histories of discourse
Language Typology and Syntactic Description
Theory of Language
Deictic shifts in fiction translation
A Short History of Linguistics
A corpus-based study of the use of Spanish demonstratives as translation equivalents of English demonstratives
Deictic Center Shifts in Literary Translation
Proximal and distal terms in Persian interactions
Translating Mad Cow Disease
Strategies in a corpus of simultaneous interpreting. Effects of directionality, phraseological richness, and position in speech event
A Computer-assisted Approach to the Analysis of Translation Shifts
This and That in the Language of Film Dubbing
Alternating mechanism of person deixis in Persian interactions
Towards an emancipatory pragmatics
Linguistic Semantics
Rethinking Context
Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life
Pragmatics
Discourse Strategies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |