A Comparison of Local and Global Features in Adaptation: A Study of the Translation of Pride and Prejudice Novel

Literary translations have developed in accordance with the essence of interactions in which the role of addressee has become much more important. Procedures such as clarification and adaptation have gained a particular place since they have included the importance of addressee and appropriateness of discourse in translation. However, the place of adaptation and its effect on literary translation have remained ambiguous. There may arise a question that whether local and global characteristics of adaptation can also be applied to a literary translation. If the answer is positive, which of the adaptation techniques enjoys a higher distribution? This article is an attempt to provide answers for these questions. It further tries to investigate the Persian translation of Pride and Prejudice novel based on Bastin (2009) taxonomy in order to find the ways adaptation has been used. The results showed that the translator has used local and global features of adaptation to better represent the writer’s message and, at the same time, to keep the beauty and effectiveness of the discourse in a way that global features outweigh local ones in their applicability. Likewise, although the translator has remained faithful to the main passages, situational equivalence and expansion are two adaptation techniques, which have been used mostly in the translation of paragraphs. In other words, for translating the text, the translator has kept the meaning but, for creating effectiveness and beauty of the discourse, adaptation proves essential.