What Do Voices Say in The Garden Party? An Analysis of Voices in the Persian Translation of Mansfield's Short Story

This study aims at investigating voices in the Persian translation of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party. In so doing, after a stylistic analysis of the voices in the original is done, it is argued by the authors that the polyphonous nature of the story is to a great extent due to the deployment of various sociolects in the story as well as the choice of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) as the mode of narration. Then, considering these stylistic features, a comparison is made between the original text and translation. In the light of the comparison, it is revealed that the range of voices heard from the translation is limited compared to the original. This diminishing of the voices in the translation is argued that is partly attributable to the observed decrease in the range of sociolects in the translation as well as the partial failure in reproducing the grammatical features of FID. All in all, this study adds one more piece of evidence to the hypothesis made in the discussions of voices and ideology in translation as to the tendency of translators to bring voices together.