A Study of Intertextual Terms in Persian and Arabic Based on Genette's Theory of Intertextuality

Persian and Arabic, in the area of Linguistics and literary criticism, are strongly influenced by the translated works. A comparative study of the Persian and Arabic books and articles on literary criticism makes clear that the Arab translators, in spite of coining different equivalents for one term, have been more successful. Being an inflectional language, can be a reason of this success for Arabic. As an example, the term “intertextuality”, has three equivalents in Arabic that respectively mean”negotiating of texts”, “permeation of texts”, and “interrelation of texts”, while in Persian, the accepted equivalent “beynâmatniat” does not include all the semantic features of this term. This article, through contrasting the Persian and Arabic equivalents of “intertextuality theory”, decides how far each of the two languages has been successful.