Contrastive Analysis of Political News Headlines Translation According to Berman’s Deformative Forces

The present research aimed at investigating the deformation of political news headlines translation between English and Persian News Agencies based on Berman`s deformative system. For this purpose, 100 news headlines in English were selected from BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, France, France 24, Financial Times, Business Times, New York Times, Politico, Guardian, CNN, Bloomberg, Middle East Eye, Euronews and Foreign Policy. The translations of the same news were selected from prominent Persian news agencies such as Fars, ISNA, IRNA, ILNA, Tasnim, Tabnak and Ghatreh. The headlines were selected from the 2015 archives of these news agencies. They were extracted, tabulated and compared to their Persian equivalents. The comparison was performed based on the 12 deformative forces of Berman’s (2000) model. Subsequently, in order to have a comprehensive view, a Chi-square test was run to see whether the frequencies of deformative strategies used were statistically meaningful. The results revealed that news headlines do undergo deformation in translation. Rationalization, expansion, destruction of linguistic patterning, qualitative impoverishment and quantitative impoverishment turned out to be the most dominant deformative forces. The frequencies of the rest of the tendencies were statistically significant. The study has implications for translators, researchers and translator trainers.