Identifying Translators By Their Word Equivalent Selection in Two Translations of “Funny in Farsi”

Authorship attribution attracted attention of many scholars for many years and is still a desirable subject especially in forensic linguistics and computational linguistics. in recent years with increasing questions about translator’s style and traces which translators leave behind, detecting translator’s fingerprints in a text is becoming more popular among researchers. this study aimed to find the possibility of detecting translators fingerprints by analyzing their choice of equivalents. materials used in this study is consisted of an english memoir called funny in farsi by firoozeh dumas which was a bestseller along with two of its translations. the first translation of funny in farsi is called “atr e sonbol atr e kaaj” translated by mohammad soleymani nia, and the second translation is called “ba mazzeh dar farsi” translated by gholamreza emami. a total of 300 polysemy words was extracted and analyzed in order to find if it is possible to detect translators solely by the equivalents they choose. in 71 cases, equivalents were not affected by the context and translators had the freedom to choose between possible equivalents to personalize their translation based on their stylistic preferences. the results indicated that translators may use equivalents that are unique to themselves and is not used by other translators, use one or more equivalents frequently, and their omission rate are the ways translators leave some traces behind. the results of this study also indicated that verbs are the most frequent words that gives the translator enough freedom to use their own version of equivalent.