Speaker-Audience Interaction in Spoken Political Discourse : A Contrastive Parallel Corpus-Based Study of English-Persian Translation of Metadiscourse Features in TED Talks

Abstract

Abstract Metadiscourse features refer to those elements by which interaction between writer-reader and/or speaker-audience is constructed. Taking this into account, the objective of this contrastive parallel corpus-based study was to explore the way metadiscourse features were used and distributed in the English discourse and their translation in the Persian language as well as analyzing the speaker-audience interaction in translation. For this purpose, 30 different TED talks in politics were randomly selected to ensure the issues of corpus representativeness and balance. The corpus consisted of 21681 tokens in English and 21164 tokens in Persian. For classifying the metadiscourse features, the model introduced by Hyland (Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. Continuum, London, 2005), whose model is classified into two main subcategories of interactive and interactional, was employed. The quantitative analysis showed that overall the number of interactional metadiscourse features was used more than that of the interactive ones in both corpora. Moreover, the results of the Chi-square test revealed that there was statistically no significant difference between the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features in English corpus and their Persian translation. The qualitative analysis revealed that there were four kinds of changes in translation as (im) explicit change, (dis)information change, (in) visibility change, and (de)emphasis change. Besides, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus revealed that the interaction between the speakers of the TED talks and the audience did not change when metadiscourse features translated from English into Persian. The results of this research can be found useful for researchers in contrastive analysis, translation studies, and corpus-based translation studies.

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