Representation of Translators’ Habitus: A Case Study of Saleh Hosseini’s Style in Persian Translation of Moby Dick; Or the Whale and To the Lighthouse

Translator studies, as a recent subfield of Translation Studies, focuses explicitly on translators rather than translated texts since translators create texts. While translators have been studied from different cultural and cognitive perspectives, their translatorial style from sociological perspectives has been remained underexplored. Against this backdrop, this study used Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a sociological theory to study major traces of Saleh Hosseini’s habitus in his translatorial style. To this end, a corpus from samples of Moby-Dick; Or the Whale and To the Lighthouse and their Persian translations was made. To study the samples, AntConc outputs were examined at morphological, lexical, and phrasal levels. Moreover, a semi-structured interview was conducted with Saleh Hosseini to complement and validate the findings. The results indicated that several aspects of Saleh Hosseini’s translatorial style, including his tendency towards using Arabic, literary, and archaic words, together with his inclination to use a wide variety of lexical items and sequence of genitive can be accounted for by the fields he comes from; in other words, his cultural capital and his primary and secondary habitus. His fields, life experiences, and interactions with various agents have shaped his style in translation, which can be known as Saleh Hosseini’s archaic style.