Translation of Metadiscourse in Scientific Texts: A Case Study of Stephen Hawking’s Prose

The present study examined the translation of metadiscourse in Hawking’s scientific texts from English into Persian using Hyland and Tse’s (2004) taxonomy of metadiscourse. More specifically, the present study explored the way Iranian translators of Stephen Hawking’s scientific texts have deal with the metadiscoursal components of the original texts and the extent to which the Persian translations of the English scientific texts have conformed to the original text in terms of metadiscoursal components. The results indicated that Literal translation, omission and equivalence were the most frequently adopted procedures for translation of metadiscourse cases in Stephen Hawking’s scientific texts from English into Persian and the procedures that had been used less than other procedures were modulation and shift. These results indicate that that the Persian translations of the English scientific texts conformed to the original text in terms of metadiscoursal components to a relatively high extent. But there was also a high percentage of cases that had been translated using omission. Therefore, there is a need to pay more attention to metadiscourse in translation of scientific texts from English into Persian.