Advances in the Linguistic Sciences

Download PDF (406.6 KB) PP. 17 - 24 Pub. Date: June 1, 2020

DOI: 10.22606/als.2020.22001

• Kazem Barzegar^*
  English Language Department, School of Medicine, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran
• Somayeh Barzegar
  Islamic Azad University, Yazd Branch, Yazd, Iran

In this retrospective meta-analysis of the semantic-spatial comparison of the Persian and English orthographic systems, 32 Persian scholarly articles and their English equivalents were compared for number of words, number of pages, number of characters, and number of lines as variables. Non-scholarly papers were excluded from the study. Data were gleaned by word count capability of Microsoft word processor. It was concluded that the English orthographic system can express more semantic content using a smaller number of words; however, considering a given semantic content, the Persian orthographic system can express the same semantic content in less pages, smaller number of characters, and smaller number of lines. So, on the whole, the Persian orthographic system is more economic and cost-effective with respect to the number of pages, characters, and lines compared to the English writing system. Since the translations were performed by only one translator, care should be exercised in generalizing the findings to papers of other academic majors. Our findings also led to the development of the following formula for predicting the translation charges of scholarly papers: Charge of Persian-to-English translation  number of Persian lines  1.35  charge per line

Persian, English, orthographic system, alphabets, lexeme

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