2022 Volume 24 Issue 2 Pages 51-66
In this paper, I examine strategies for translating motion events from English into Japanese and Persian and discuss the similarities and differences between Japanese and Persian “rhetorical style”. J.K. Rowling’s (1999) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (English original as well as Japanese and Persian translations) was used as corpus data for this research, from which 222 sentences were collected that included motion events representing a change in the location of a figure. The results indicated that manner of motion was encoded more in Japanese than in Persian, with manner of motion being omitted more often in Persian. Furthermore, the study revealed that both languages encoded the path of motion events with similar frequency and that both languages tended to omit path elements. A notably high use of deictic verbs was also observed for both Japanese and Persian.
