Abstract This paper investigates ideological aspects of literary translations by specifically focusing on the analysis of the textual features of a literary source text (namely, Sadeq Hedayat’s Buf-e Kur [The Blind Owl], a novel originally published in Persian in 1937) and its corresponding translated target text (namely, The Blind Owl, rendered into English by D. P. Costello in 1957). Inspired mainly by Hatim and Mason’s (1990, 1991, 1997) theoretical framework for the analysis and assessment of translated works, the researchers have analysed the target text by accounting for the sets of constraints relating to genre, discourse, and text as semiotic systems within which the expression of ideology takes place. In order to indicate the translator’s ideological orientations, the study has mainly concentrated on three textual features, namely, “transitivity shifts”, “nominalizations”, and “modality shifts”, together with a handful of lexical choices suggesting “domestication”. Venuti’s proposal (1995) – that the present status of English as a “dominant” language serves as a motive for translators to adopt a “domesticating” strategy – has also been drawn on.

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