applying catford’s shifts to the farsi translation of psychology texts

this study was an attempt to investigate the realization of catford’s shifts in the farsi translation of english psychology texts, a product-oriented point of view, shedding light on the areas farsi is different english. inspired by a study conducted by khorshidi (2010), the two questions raised in the study sought to detect the kinds of shifts applied in the translation of english psychology texts according to catford’s theory, and to explore the most frequently used shifts in those texts which include the normal aspects of farsi psychology texts. to this end, five books on psychology (originally written in english) and their farsi translations were chosen and a total of six chapters were ed randomly for the analysis. through a contrastive analysis, 307 coupled pairs of source text and target text segments were detected and extracted these six chapters and thence tabulated and analyzed, being observed as instances of the realization of catford’s model of shifts. the obtained results of the corpora demonstrated that all types of shifts were used in the translation of psychology texts english into farsi according to catford’s theory. furthermore, the results proved that structural shifts were the most frequently employed kinds of shifts.