Applying Catford’s Category Shifts to the Persian Translations of Three English Romantic Poems

This research aimed at evaluating the types and frequency of category shifts in the Persian translations of English poems based on Catford’s model of shifts. To this end, three English romantic poems of A Histo- ry of English Literature, namely, Blake’s ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, and Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ along with their Persian translations by Abjadian were investigated in detail and instances of shifts in the words, phrases, and clauses were discovered and analyzed to see whether Abjadian has incorporated category shifts in his translation, what kinds of category shift are made, and how frequently shifts are used in literary translation. The findings of the research demonstrated that shifts are inevitable as a result of the different nature of languages and variations that exist among them, and in order to render an exact and faithful translation of poetry from English to Persian, shifts are indispensable; in addition, while all types of category shifts were used in the studied poems, structural shifts and class shifts proved to be the most and the least frequent shifts, while intra-system and unit shifts in translation were in the second and third ranks, respectively.