The level of explicitation of reference in the translation of medical texts from English into Persian: A case study on basic histology

•An overview of the changes in explicitness level of Personals and demonstratives.•Entities in Persian texts are more discourse-active than their English counterparts.•It and they experience some shift of explicitness, implicitness and meaning.•Obligatory implicitness of the and obligatory explicitness of personal endings. The level of explicitness of cohesive devices may change through the process of translation; therefore, the present study is an attempt to investigate how English reference ties as cohesive devices are translated into Persian in the published and Google translation versions in medical texts, bearing in mind the degree of changes in the level of explicitness (Blum-Kulka's hypothesis (1986/2000)) in the process of translation. To this end, Halliday and Hasan's (1976) model is employed as the theoretical backbone of the study. Furthermore, the number and percentage of the different reference ties are calculated and a Chi-Square test is run. The results indicate two kinds of shifts introduced by Blum-Kulka (1986/2000) as well as another kind of shift, the shift of implicitness occurring in the process of translation. The research findings also show it, the and they undergo explicitness or implicitness shift, shift of meaning or even all of the three. Regarding it and they, when translated as demonstratives plus their referents, they experience (optional) explicitness shift and shift of meaning. However, when omitted, it and they encounter an obligatory implicitness, which are not to be considered as shifts. Comparative references also undergo optional shifts of explicitness in the second Persian translation.