Textual Analysis of an English Dentistry Textbook and Its Persian Translation: A Schema-Based Approach

Abstract: The present study attempts to scrutinize the constituting single words or schemata comprising an English dentistry textbook and its Persian translation on the basis of microstructural approach to schema theory. To this end seventy pages constituting ten percent of both English and Persian texts were chosen randomly, parsed, codified and assigned to the three schema domains, i.e., semantic, syntactic and parasyntactic. The genera as well as species of the domains were also specified and codified. To limit the scope of the study, however, only the semantic domain schemata constituting the two texts were analyzed in terms of their types and tokens. It was hypothesized the Persian translation will be schema-based if the types and tokens of its semantic schema genera and species would not differ significantly from those of the English text. The results, however, showed that the two texts differed significantly from each other at the domain, genus and species level. The findings thus confirm schema theory as an objective criterion to evaluate the empirical validity of translated texts. The pedagogical implications of the findings within the fields of translation, foreign language teaching and testing are discussed.