Judging Books by Their Visual Features: A Case Study of the Three Persian Translations of Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Book-length Essay “A Room of One’s Own”

Nowadays visual language as the tool of comprehension and communication, is considered very significant and important in our contemporary societies. In fact, visual language, as a communicative tool can be used for various reasons and aims, for drawing people’s attention. In addition, visual language is especially used by writers and translators for better and quick understanding the subject and message(s) of their books-when the reader tries to take a decision for buying a book. Therefore, visual language like verbal language, encounters with various ideologies. In this regard, this study attempted to analyse the textual features, and the cover page design of the Persian translations of the feminist non-fictitious novel (book-length essay), “A Room of One’s Own” written by Woolf (1995), which were translated after the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, to reveal the ideological implication(s). To do so, this study was conducted based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) semiotic framework, and Machin’s (2007) model of typographical analysis was also employed in this research. This study as a descriptive, explanatory and comparative research adopted the qualitative method. The findings showed that the feminist ideological loads of the original book were manipulated by the decisions, choices, and selections of the Iranian translators. But, the manipulations and changes, which were done at the semiotic level, did not significantly affect the writer’s feminist messages, the subject, and the feminist ideological loads of the English book, A Room of One’s Own. This study may be good for the translators whom want to choose and select

A Room of One’s Own, Critical Study, Ideology, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) Semiotic Framework, Machin’s (2007) Model of Typographical Analysis, Manipulation, Virginia Woolf