The Equivalence and Shift in the Persian Translation of English Complex Sentences with wh-Subordinate Clauses

The main purpose of this research is to find the types of equivalence and shifts in the Persian translation of English complex sentences with wh-subordinate clauses. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method. The English fictions and their Persian translations considered as source of the data. The researcher classifies the data into two main categories: the equivalence and shift. The equivalence is subcategorized into formal and dynamic equivalence based on Nida's theory. In this research, four categories of shift, based on Catford's classification, which involve structure shifts, unit shifts, rank shifts and intra-system shifts, have been found. Based on 160 data, the results of this research indicated that in the Persian translation of these sentences, the shifts occur more than the equivalence, with the percentage of 86.25% and the equivalence with the percentage of 13.75%.