A contrastive Analysis of Relative Clauses in Persian and English: A comparison between Translated and Original Short Stories

Contrastive analysis has been a vital and systematic branch of applied linguistics which copes with linguistic description of the structure of two or more languages. This study was conducted to determine the frequency of relative clauses in Persian and English. To do this, two groups of data were analyzed; the first one contained 80 pages consisting of several short stories written by native Persian writers and the same amount written by English native writers. The second group of data contained 80 pages of English short stories written by different native writers and their Persian translations. The font size was the same in all groups. The results revealed that although the frequency of relative clauses was more in English short stories compared to original Persian short stories, but this finding was not observed in the analysis of English stories and their Persian translations; while translating English stories, Persian translators used more relative clauses compared to the original English writers of the same stories.