Space-building and its Strategies in Translation from English to Persian Based on Fauconnier's Mental Spaces Theory (1998)

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the manner of space-building and how space is transmitted during the process of translation from English to Persian based on Fauconnier's (1998) mental spaces theory. This paper aims to evaluate the role and frequency of space-builders in the formation of mental spaces and the degree of alignment of mental spaces with the audience of two languages. The role of contextual and pragmatics factors, and translator influences in conveying homogeneous spaces is another issue that has been addressed in this study. The research data set contains 100 sentences of two novels, The Kite Runner (Hosseini, 2003) and The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway, 1990) and the equivalent translation of these two works (Ghabraei, 1396; Daryabandari, 1385) which are compared and assessed in a descriptive-analytic study. The findings indicate that  the most frequency of space-builders belong to prepositional phrases and adverbial elements  and despite of some differences in the type and number of space-builders in two language sentences, the establishment of spaces is almost identical. The role of contextual and pragmatic factors was also important in disambiguating some words, in correct text translation and in the transmission of mental space details.