An Examination of Berman’s Negative Deformation Tendencies on Persian Translation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles Novel

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the frequency of deforming tendencies on Persian translation of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles based on Berman’s model. Moreover, the study set out to find out how words have been changed from the source language to fit the target language by adopting deforming tendencies. To achieve the aims of study, the researchers relied on content or document analysis as a qualitative type of study to analyze the strategies which were used in the translation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles novel from English to Persian. The data came from a sample of 300 sentences which were randomly selected from the novel translated into the Persian language by Mina Sarabi.The trustworthiness of the research findings was met through inter-rater agreement and it was reported 0.94. The results indicated that Persian translation of the work suffered from lexical mismatches, destruction of rhythm and destruction of vernacular networks, although destruction of rhythms and destruction of vernacular networks were among the most frequently used deformation tendencies. The findings also revealed that the translation has in one way or another maintained the genre and social stance of the author. Overall, it appears that Berman offers a model which is too severe on keeping the form and syntax of the source text in the Persian translation of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.