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Abstract
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Central to descriptive Translation Studies is the concept of Translation Universals (TUs), referring to linguistic features idiosyncratic to translation, typically not occurring in original texts and not influenced by a given language pair. Over the past three decades, almost all literature about TUs is on Western languages, especially English as translated from/to other related European languages, and other languages have been ignored. If features of translational language are to be generalized as TUs, supporting evidence from non-European languages should be provided. Using Chesterman’s (2004) categorization of S-universals and T-universals, the present corpus-based study sets out to investigate T-universals of simplification and explicitation in a comparable corpus of translational and original Persian expository texts. Aiming at finding distinctive lexical and syntactic features of translational Persian, this study raises intriguing questions regarding the presence of universal features in translations as none of the results regarding the features addressed were in line with previously proposed T-universals.
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