Investigating Grammatical Cohesive Devices: Shifts of cohesion in translating narrative text type

Abstract This study focused mainly on the shifts of the grammatical cohesion in texts translated from English into Persian. It aimed to identify the grammatical cohesive devices (GCDs) in ST and TT separately, based on Halliday and Hassn's Model (1976), determine the number of occurrences of GCDs in two texts and finally, illustrate types of shifts of grammatical cohesion and strategies used in TT. To achieve these aims, a mixed-method (comparative and descriptive model) research design was used to spot cohesive shifts in TT due to translation, together with the employed strategies. To this purpose, the book, Oral Reproduction of Stories was investigated, with its translation. 39 different stories by different writers were selected as the sample of analysis. The results showed that the TT adopted all the three types of GCDs except verbal and casual substitution, with verbal substitution in Persian being carried down by reference, ellipsis and lexical cohesion. The occurrence of GCDs in the TT was more frequent than that of ST. Regarding the general analysis of the cohesion shifts, the study showed that three types of shifts (i.e. establishment of new cohesion, elimination of cohesion and change of type of cohesive features) occur in translation. Finally it was revealed that the translation strategies undertaken by the various translators are motivated and influenced by three factors (i. e. systemic language differences Baker (1992), stylistic preferences and the translation process itself (Blum- Kulka, 1986).