Bakhtin’s Polyphony and Translation: A Case Study of a Persian Translation of Alice Munro’s Runaway

Abstract

Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), as a Russian linguist and philosopher introduced the concept of ‘voice’ in the text. This paper investigates the voices in the Persian translation of Alice Munro’s Runaway based on Bakhtin’s theory on polyphony. The methodology is content analysis. As Munday (2008) indicates in order to investigate the voices it is necessary to analyze the style in the source text, and to make comparison between source and target text. By the following Munday’s strategies on the stylistic analysis, the researcher shows that the polyphonic nature in the Runaway is due to the Munro’s choice of the Free Indirect Discourse (FID) as the mode of narration. Findings reveal the voices existed in source text have been reduced in target text due to the partial failure in rendering and reproducing the lexical and grammatical features of FID.