Pseudotranslation in Dr. Shariati’s Books?

According to Toury (1995) pseudotranslation happens when in a translation there are “texts which have been presented as translations with no corresponding source texts in other languages ever having existed” (p.47). An example of this phenomenon is evident in Dr. Ali Shariati’s writings; they include some quotations which he has attributed to a professor called Chandelle while—as it was shown in this article—these are his own words. To evaluate the claim from a scientific point of view four books by Dr. Shariati were selected as corpus of the study and CUSUM (cumulative sum control chart) technique was used to compare writing style of Dr. Shariati and the so called professor Chandelle. The results of the analysis revealed that Dr. Shariati has used pseudotranslating as a strategy in his books and what he has claimed as translations from Chandelle’s writings have, in fact, been written by Dr. Shariati himself. The reason for this action could be the political conditions of the time under which he decided to hide his identity when criticizing the dictatorship to avoid later prosecution.