A quantitative comparison of the source text and the target text: Three translations of Jebran's The Prophet and a translation of Al-Ahmad's Gharb Zadegi

Considering the importance of style in corpus studies, the present article investigates one of the quantitative aspects of style, namely type-token. The questions of the translation style and translator style have been the subject of many recent studies, but the question of translators’ style has not been addressed so far. The present study is an attempt to fill the gap. To this end, three Persian translations of Khalil Jebran’s The Prophet and one English translation of Al-Ahmad’s Gharb Zadegi were selected and a contrastive analysis was conducted to reveal the changes occurring through the process of translation. The hypothesis was that type-token ratio in the target text is less than that in the source text. The contrastive analysis of the ST and the TT, followed by the Chi-square test, revealed that there was no significant difference between type- token ratio between the ST and the TT. But typetoken ratio in the English translation of Gharb Zadegi was less than that in the source text. As a result, it seems that the concise style of Gharb Zadegi has been transferred into a more wordy style.