Information Structure in Translations of Short Stories: The Case of Alice Munro

Information structure (IS) - the study of how speakers structure their sentences to convey new information - refers to the partitioning of sentences into categories such as theme/rheme, focus/background, topic/link, old/new etc. The study of changes in information structure in translation can be of high significance, since certain (marked) structures are employed by writers to develop different aspects of their texts. The present study is a descriptive-analytical corpus-based study addressing the role of information structure, or more technically speaking markedness as a sub-domain of IS, in translation. The corpus for the present study was a parallel one consisting of the English short story collection Runaway, written by Alice Munro (2013 Nobel Prize winner) along with its Persian translation by the Iranian translator Mojdeh Daghighi. A number of 308 and 206 marked items were identified in the ST and TT respectively, which were tabulated. The marked items were classified based on the Hallidayan linguistic taxonomy of marked sentences as presented by Baker 1992. The results revealed that certain types of marked structures were considered as having a higher level of markedness, therefore there was a sense of necessity on the side of the translator to render them as marked sentences. The results also suggested that marked structures are almost always used with an intention, therefore any omission or neutralization of them leads to a change in the emphasis of the intentions of the author.