Catford’s Translation Shifts in Translating Vocabulary-Learning Books from English to Persian

The present study investigates the realization of Catford s translation shifts in translated English vocabulary-learning books by determining their frequency of occurrence. For this purpose, seven popular vocabulary books were selected, and 210 ST-TT pairs were chosen and analyzed according to Catford s Taxonomy of translation shifts. The obtained data revealed that the Structural Shift is the most frequent translation shift and the Level Shift is the least common type of Catford s shift in the selected translations. The study indicates that only 11.90 % of the selected translations had undergone Class Shift; that means English and Persian can offer equivalents of the same part of speech. Unit Shift occurred in 43.33% of the translated sentences, most probably because translations of English vocabulary-learning books tend to be explanatory and transparent. 69.52% of the shifts were mainly Intra-System Shifts because the translators tried to avoid foreign structures that sound weird to Persian speakers. It is noteworthy that the previously conducted studies generally focused on text-types such as psychology and literature. This study contributes to the translation field by shedding light on a different text-type and context using Catford s translation shifts.