catford’s translation shifts in translating vocabulary-learning books from english to persian

The present study investigates the realization of catford's translation shifts in translated english vocabulary-learning books by determining their frequency of occurrence. for this purpose, seven popular vocabulary books were selected, and 210 st-tt pairs were chosen and analyzed according to catford's taxonomy of translation shifts. the obtained data revealed that the structural shift is the most frequent translation shift and the level shift is the least common type of catford's shift in the selected translations. the study indicates that only 11.90 % of the selected translations had undergone class shift; that means english and persian can offer equivalents of the same part of speech. unit shift occurred in 43.33% of the translated sentences, most probably because translations of english vocabulary-learning books tend to be explanatory and transparent. 69.52% of the shifts were mainly intra-system shifts because the translators tried to avoid foreign structures that sound weird to persian speakers. it is noteworthy that the previously conducted studies generally focused on text-types such as psychology and literature. this study contributes to the translation field by shedding light on a different text-type and context using catford's translation shifts.