AN INVESTIGATION OF METADISCOURSE MARKERS IN ENGLISH MEDICAL TEXTS AND THEIR PERSIAN TRANSLATION BASED ON HYLAND'S MODEL

Abstract

This study was conducted tocompare and contrast the metadiscourse markers in English medical texts and their Persian translation to investigate whether these markers function identically in English and Persian within the same genre and to find out if there are any significant differences between English medical texts and their Persian translation in terms of the number and types of metadiscourse markers. To this end, 35 English medical articles and their Persian translation, published in Sina Journal, were selected. To gather data, first, 4 consecutive paragraphs were extracted randomly from each of the selected articles and their Persian translation to collect 280 paragraphs, 140 paragraphs in English as the source text (ST) and 140 paragraphs in Persian as the target text (TT). This was followed by analyzing the frequency and types of metadiscourse markers in each text­– which consisted of 4 consecutive paragraphs in ST and TT– in accordance with Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy. Next, the total number of metadiscourse items in each of the texts was determined. Finally, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (KS-test) was used to report normally distributed data and the paired t-test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test were applied to compare the values of means of metadiscourse markers in English medical texts and their equivalent Persian translation and to study whether these markers function identically in English and Persian within the same genre. The statistical results suggest that there is a significant difference in the amount and types of metadiscourse markers in English medical texts and their Persian translation (P<0.001) and the distribution of different types of metadiscourse markers in English medical texts is not the same as their distribution in their Persian translation