An Investigation and Analysis of Semantic-Syntactic Alignment in Persian Translations of Tuesdays with Morrie
Subject Areas : پژوهشهای ادبیات کلاسیک ایران
Fatemeh Zahra Favaedi
1
,
Fatemeh Bahrami
2
*
1 - M.A in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
2 - Associate Professor in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
Keywords: literary translation, the novel “Tuesdays with Morrie”, translation evaluation, Garces Model, syntactic-semantic correspondence.,
Abstract :
An Investigation and Analysis of Semantic-Syntactic Alignment in Persian Translations
of Tuesdays with Morrie
Fatemeh Zahra Favaedi*
Fatemeh Bahrami**
The present paper evaluates the syntactic and semantic conformity of two successful and best-selling Persian translations of the English novel "Tuesdays with Morrie" by Mitch Albom, based on the Garcés model (1994). The two mentioned translations were examined according to the semantic-lexical and syntactic-morphological components of the Garces model. Then they were evaluated from the perspective of two criteria of acceptability and adequacy. The findings indicated that Ghahremani's translation, in most cases, successfully conveyed the sentence structures into Persian, demonstrating reliable performance at the syntactic-morphological level. In contrast, Salim and Salim's translation has been enhanced in conveying the meaning and has performed well at the semantic-lexical level. Moreover, syntactic-semantic conformity does not necessarily mean successful conveyance of meaning, and these two are not always aligned. Finally, it is up to the translator to decide which attribute is preferred in the translation.
Keywords: literary translation, the novel “Tuesdays with Morrie”, translation evaluation, Garces Model, syntactic-semantic correspondence.
Introduction and Theoretical Framework
The present study draws on Carmen Valero Garcés’s (1994) evaluation model to examine the degree of semantic–syntactic correspondence in two Persian translations of Mitch Albom’s novel Tuesdays with Morrie and to explore how this correspondence affects the transfer of meaning from the source language (English) to the target language (Persian). Among the available translations, the versions by Mandana Ghahremanlou (Tehran, Qatreh, 35th ed., 2021) and Maryam Salim and Monireh Salim (Tehran, Soneboleh, 29th ed., 2003) were selected as the corpus of the study due to their continued reprints and popularity among readers. The English text published by the Crown served as the source text for comparison. Because of its emotional–philosophical theme and its portrayal of lived experiences related to love, family, illness, and death, Tuesdays with Morrie is a work in which the quality of rendering semantic and structural subtleties in translation directly shapes the reader’s reception. This makes a systematic examination of its translations particularly necessary. The theoretical framework of the study is Garcés’s evaluation model, which distinguishes four levels—semantic–lexical, syntactic–morphological, discoursal–functional, and stylistic–pragmatic—and defines, for each level, a set of components and strategies for assessing translations. In line with the research aim, the analysis is limited to the first two levels, namely the semantic–lexical and syntactic–morphological, while the discoursal–functional and stylistic–pragmatic levels are left for future studies. Within this model, the components at each level are classified into three categories—“increase,” “maintenance,” and “reduction” of information from the source text to the target text—and each is assigned a positive, negative, or neutral value. On this basis, two key indices of translation quality are obtained: “adequacy” (correctness and accuracy in transferring content and structure) and “acceptability” (fluency, clarity, and impact on the reader). The review of previous research shows that Garcés’s model has been used in recent years to evaluate translations of various text types in Persian, including novels, religious and classical works, and texts such as Nahj al-Balāgha and Tārikh-e Beyhaqi. These studies generally highlight the model’s potential to reduce subjectivity in translation criticism and to combine quantitative and qualitative analysis. However, relatively few studies have focused on multiple Persian translations of a single contemporary English novel from the perspective of semantic–syntactic correspondence. The present research is situated within this gap and seeks to provide a clearer picture of the relationship between translation strategies and the quality of translated literary texts by applying Garcés’s model. Accordingly, the article is structured around three main questions: (1) in what aspects of the syntactic–morphological level can instances of non-correspondence between the two translations and the source text be identified; (2) in what areas of the semantic–lexical level can semantic discrepancies between the English text and the two Persian translations be observed; and (3) how the overall pattern of correspondences and non-correspondences affects the transfer of meaning from the source language to the target language and relates to the indices of adequacy and acceptability. The research method is descriptive-analytic and based on contrastive analysis. First, the English text of the novel and both Persian translations were read in full. Through a multi-step procedure, instances in which a difference or change at the semantic–lexical or syntactic–morphological level was observed were extracted. These instances were then classified according to the components defined for the two levels in Garcés’s model.
Discussion and Results
At the semantic–lexical level, the components included “definition and explanation,” “cultural substitution,” “adaptation,” “syntactic expansion,” “syntactic reduction,” “use of a generic term instead of a specific one and vice versa,” and “ambiguity.” At the syntactic–morphological level, the components considered were “literal translation,” “syntactic change,” “change of point of view,” “compensation,” “semantic or explicative expansion,” “implication,” “reduction,” “omission,” and “change of sentence type.” Each instance was then assigned to one of the three strategies- “increase,” “maintenance,” or “reduction”-and its positive, negative, or neutral value in relation to translation quality was determined. Finally, the frequency of each component and each type of strategy in the two translations was calculated, allowing for statistical comparison and qualitative interpretation. The findings at the semantic–lexical level indicate that Ghahremanlou’s translation is more active than that of Salim and Salim in terms of both the number of instances and the variety of strategies. At this level, 111 cases were identified in Ghahremanlou’s translation and 79 in Salim and Salim’s. In both translations, “syntactic expansion” occurs frequently, but it is more common in Ghahremanlou’s version. In her translation, “definition and explanation” and “cultural substitution” are used more extensively to clarify implicit meanings, cultural references, and semantic relations between clauses, and in a few cases, “adaptation” is also employed. In contrast, Salim and Salim show a stronger tendency towards “syntactic reduction” and simplification. As a result, the target text is more concise in many instances, but some semantic and imagistic details of the source text are occasionally reduced or omitted. The analysis of the “use of a generic term instead of a specific one and vice versa” shows that this strategy is employed in both translations, though it appears slightly more frequently in Salim and Salim’s version. This can influence the precision of imagery and the representation of the author’s distinctive style. With respect to “ambiguity,” the two translations display similar frequencies, suggesting that part of the ambiguity stems from the structure of the source text itself, although in some cases a wider use of explicative strategies might have resolved it. Overall, at the semantic–lexical level, Ghahremanlou’s translation, through additive strategies and the use of cultural equivalents, shows greater effort to bring the world of the novel closer to Persian readers’ frame of reference, whereas Salim and Salim’s translation primarily focuses on preserving the main narrative line and maintaining brevity. At the syntactic–morphological level, the results indicate that neither translator relies predominantly on literal translation; English structures are generally recast in more natural Persian patterns. However, the type and extent of syntactic change differ between the two versions. According to the table of syntactic non-correspondence components, 330 cases were recorded in Salim and Salim’s translation and 217 in Ghahremanlou’s. In Salim and Salim’s version, “omission,” “reduction,” and “change of sentence type” occur more frequently. Complex sentences in the source text are often converted into simple sentences, some informational elements are omitted, and sentence types are altered. This approach contributes to the fluency of the target text and speed of reading, but in some instances, it has resulted in the emphatic structures and the distinctive style of the source author’s prose being rendered into Persian with less precision. In Ghahremanlou’s translation, by contrast, components such as “syntactic expansion,” “semantic or explicative expansion,” and “change in the order of constituents” are more prominent. In many cases, instead of omitting or reducing sentence elements, explanatory clauses are added, or constituents are rearranged so that logical, temporal, and emotional relations are made clearer to the Persian reader. From the perspective of Garcés’s model, such expansions are considered positive strategies: although they may increase syntactic non-correspondence on the surface, they contribute to the adequacy and acceptability of the translation. Conversely, the high frequency of reductive strategies in Salim and Salim’s translation, while producing a shorter and more fluent text, sometimes leads to the loss of structural subtleties and secondary information contained in the source text. The analysis of the threefold categorization of “increase, maintenance, and reduction,” along with the positive/negative/neutral evaluation of the components, shows that in Ghahremanlou’s translation, additive and explicative strategies predominate at both the semantic–lexical and syntactic–morphological levels, and reductive strategies are less frequent. In Salim and Salim’s translation, by contrast, reductive and omission strategies occupy a more prominent place. Consequently, Ghahremanlou’s translation displays a higher number of positive features and a lower number of negative ones. This suggests that, in terms of both adequacy and acceptability, her translation occupies a more favorable position, even though Salim and Salim’s version succeeds, at the semantic–lexical level, in rendering the core meaning of many sentences into Persian in a concise and accessible way. At the syntactic–morphological level, however, Ghahremanlou’s translation, particularly through syntactic and semantic expansion, reproduces the structure of the source text more precisely and coherently. In the discussion and conclusion, the data indicate that semantic–syntactic correspondence alone does not guarantee more effective meaning transfer, and that many strategies which seem to create non-correspondence on the surface are, in practice, necessary to bridge structural and cultural gaps between the two languages. Strategies such as “syntactic expansion,” “change of point of view,” and “semantic expansion,” while producing formal differences between source and target texts, can help ensure accurate message transfer by clarifying semantic relations and resolving ambiguities. Conversely, extensive use of reductive and omission strategies, although it shortens the text and improves fluency, may reduce semantic and structural richness and blur some of the subtle layers of the source text. Finally, while the potential of Garcés’s model to provide a coherent framework for translation assessment is underlined, some limitations are also acknowledged. For example, the component “definition” is treated as a neutral strategy in the model, whereas in translation between culturally distant languages it can play an explicitly positive role in resolving ambiguity and conveying meaning more accurately. In addition, the status of some components—such as the “use of a generic term instead of a specific one”—is not clearly defined within the tripartite categorization of increase, maintenance, and reduction. The limitations of the present study are also noted, including its focus on two specific translations of a single literary novel and its analysis of only two of the four levels in Garcés’s model. It is suggested that future research should extend the analysis to the discoursal–functional and stylistic–pragmatic levels, both in the same corpus and in other literary and non-literary texts, in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of translation strategies, semantic–syntactic correspondence, and reader reception.
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* M.A in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
0009-0002-2211-8168
** Corresponding Author: Associate Professor in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
0000-0002-0944-9707
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Delisle, J. (1980) L'Analyse du discourse comme méthode de traduction. Otawa: Editions de l'Université d'Otawa.
Mounin, G. (1963) Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction. Paris: Gallimard. Translation into Spanish by Julio Lago Alonso, 1971, 1977. Los problemas teóricos de la traducción.
Newmark, P. (1988) A textbook of Translation. New York: Prentice- Hall.
Nida, E. (1976) “A Framework for the Analysis and Evaluation of Theories of Translation” in Translation: Applications and Research. Brislin, R.W. (edt.) New York, Gardner Press, 47-91.
Santoyo, J.C. (1985) El delito de traducir. León: Universidad de León, Servicio de Publicaciones.
Vazquez- Ayora, G. (1977) Introducción a la Traductología. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Vinay, J.P. & Darbelnet, J. (1958/1977) Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais. Paris: Didier.