The Impact of English on Persian Modal Auxiliaries through Translation

This article is an attempt first to introduce translation as a linguistic-cultural process, and then to seek the impact of the English language on Persian modal auxiliaries. Parallel corpora of Persian translated and original texts derived from the area of educational psychology were analyzed based on the theoretical framework of House (1997, 2001). The results show us that although the discoursal-pragmatic priorities of English modal auxiliaries did not predominate directly over their Persian equivalents in Persian translated texts due to the contact phenomenon, the Persian cultural filter was applied less consistently in the second time span, leading to a growing tendency towards the extreme of possibility on the certainty continuum while in the first half, the dominance of certainty extreme was witnessed in Persian original texts.