Drawing upon the framework of Catford’s Shifts, this study is a DA investigation into the translation of passive voice in English speeches of the US politicians during the year 2013. Having carried out a detailed discourse analysis on a corpus of 29 speeches, the number of frequencies and percentages of the instances were computed. The findings show that in translating passive structures in political speeches, translators use structural shifts with high frequency; however, class shifts were used when the translator was not able to create the same effect or emphasize a particular message, while intra-system, unit and level shifts were not used at all. Having been applied Catford’s translation notion mostly on literary or some psychology texts in previous studies, this research has contributed to the theory in the genre of political texts.
Keywords: Catford's Categories, Discourse Analysis, Passive voice, Persian Translation, Political Discourse Analysis, Political Speeches
