A Comparative Study of “Little Women” and Its Persian Translation: A Catford’s Category Shift Perspective

The present study aimed to find Catford’s category shifts used in Persian translation of ‘Little Women’ to determine the most frequent used category shift in the translation and check whether there is a significant difference between used shifts. To do so, the book ‘Little Women’ written by Luisa May Alcott and it Persian translation by Maryam Dastum were selected. One hundred and forty (140) simple declarative sentences (10 sentences from each chapter) and their Persian translations were chosen as the sample. Types of category shifts according to Catford’s Shift Model (i.e. structure shift, class shift, unit shift, and intra-system shift) were found and listed. The number of each type of category shift and its percentage was calculated. At last, a Chi-square Test was conducted to investigate the possible significant difference between applied category shifts in the translation.