A Comparative Study on the English to Persian Translation of Hedges in the Abstracts of M.A. Theses in English Translation Studies

The purpose of this study was to investigate the distribution of functions and forms of hedging devices in the abstracts of master’s theses in two languages (English and Persian) written by Iranian students. To this end, 70 abstracts of M.A. theses were selected as the corpus. The total number of words in both English and Persian abstracts were 19,933 and 23,073, respectively. The categories of hedges were extracted based on Hyland’s taxonomy of hedge. The data were analysed using a number of Chi-Square analyses. The results showed that there was a significant difference between English and Persian texts in the use of hedging. There were more hedging devices in English abstracts, while the Persian versions employed fewer hedge devices. The differences were interpreted to be related to the degree of awareness, purpose, cultural background of the learners, etc. The findings of this study can be helpful in teaching academic writing, teaching Persian to speakers of other languages, and translation instructors.