Investigating translation technique used for parallel constructions in the translation of Masnavi Manavi

The process of translation has always imposed degrees of syntactic, semantic and aesthetic changes on the source text. Often, the changes made to the source text are compensated by translators in order to more or less deliver the message to target readers. Poetry, especially Persian poetry due to its harmonious and rhythmic nature as is translated to other languages experiences lots of deformations. One of the Persian masterpieces in verse is Masnavi Manavi which has been translated into English . Since this work is decorated with parallelistic constructions, these constructions were seen to be misplaced and deformed in English. But it was not clear if these constructions compensated or not. Further, if compensated how they are compensated. This study felt this problem and investigated it. In order to resolve this problem, the three existing English translations of Masnavi were selected. 156 verses of Masnavi extracted along with their English translations from the 6 BOOKS of Masnavi. They have been put side by side and the deformations which were compensated underlined and their types of compensatory strategies determined. Results indicated that of the favorite compensatory strategies, compensation in place, by merging, in type and by splitting were occurred 82%, 14%, 11% and 1% respectively. Also, it has been found that there were parallel constructions which have been compensated using more than one strategy. They were compensation in type & compensation in place 25%, compensation by splitting and compensation in place 8%, compensation by splitting & compensation in type 4%, compensation by merging & compensation in place 2% and compensation by merging and compensation in type 1%. The results, their interpretations and justifications indicated that to very high degree translators acted freely disregarding the source text formal considerations.