A Rhetorical Analysis of Stance Taking in Translation of Theses Abstracts in Social and Natural Sciences

This study targets the stance component of writer-reader interaction by integrating Hyland’s (2005) and Catford (1965) frameworks to investigate counseling and chemistry English theses abstracts; the former for lexical stance markers and the latter for translation shifts. The corpus included 30 English theses abstracts, 15 from each field. The data were first analyzed by the researchers and the total number of stance marker as well as translation shifts applied in their translations from Persian into English were counted and tabulated and their frequencies were computed. Moreover, chi-square was run to compare the results. The results suggested significant differences between those disciplines with regard to the stance markers in application of hedges and boosters. With regard to translation shifts, significant differences were witnessed in structural and class shifts.