Punctuation in Translation: The Unseen Side of the Coin

Abstract

This paper critically surveys the role of three punctuation marks: the colon, the semicolon, and the comma, in
translating from English to Persian. It aims at investigating how problematic these punctuation marks can be and to what extent
the students’ familiarity with their pragmatic and metadiscourse functions can affect their translation from English to Persian. To
accomplish this, twenty two graduate students of translation were selected and asked to translate some sentences from English
to Persian. The results have indicated that only a minority of them were successful. The root causes of their poor performance
can be traced back to the lack of contrastive study on punctuation systems of English and Persian as well as lack of familiarity
with metadiscourse functions of punctuation marks.