DEICTICS AND TRANSLATION

To organize and encode what he has in mind, man uses specific features including deixis/deictics, repetition and grouping to maintain the coherence of a text.

Communication is the most important function of language. A language cannot meet with the needs of language users as a real human language without the help of deixis.

The present endeavor studied person, place and time deixis in three English stories (Gift, Miss Brill and Clay), three Farsi stories (Wagabound Dog, That Way and an excerpt from The Blind Owl) and the English translation of The Blind Owl as well as the Farsi translation of Clay.

Based on the data under study in the current work, a noticeable difference is observed in the use of person, place and time deixis in stories written in these two languages. The average use of person, place and time deixis were successively %7 , %2.22 and %0.02 in Farsi stories while the average use of these deixis in English stories were successively %14.01, %0.42 and %0.8. These figures show that in English,person deixis is used twice as much as it is used in Farsi.The average application of place deixis in Farsi is five times as much as it is in English whereas the average percentage of the time deixis in English is close to forty times more than Farsi. It should be mentioned that both place and time deixis are used very little in both Farsi and English.

To convey a message from the "source language" to the "target language", we make use of "explicit" and "implicit" information. To preserve the coherence of a text, we use different tools, one of which is the use of deixis. Therefore it can be said that we can use the ratio of the application of deixis, particulary person deixis, as a criterion to understand if a translation reads natural or not.