Genre Analysis of English Abstracts and Their Persian Translations

This research aimed at investigating English and Persian abstracts of TEFL theses. In order to achieve the objective of the study, 120 English thesis abstracts and their Persian translations of Iranian TEFL students at MA level at different universities of Iran were collected and analyzed. The sampling method used was purposive sampling. The qualitative content analysis was done by two raters based on Swales’ (2004) model. Then, the frequencies and percentages of different moves were calculated in the English and Persian corpora. Finally, Chi-square tests were run to check the significance of difference between the frequencies of different moves in the English and Persian corpora. The results showed the occurrence of various moves in the English corpus. The results also confirmed that different moves were present in the Persian corpus. Finally, the results demonstrated that there was a significant difference between the frequencies of different moves in the two corpora, except Move 1 Step 2 Making topic generalizations, Move 2 Step 1B Indicating a gap, Move 2 Step 1C Question raising, and Move 3 step 6 (PISF) Stating the value of the present research.