Linguistics & Translation

This paper investigates the efficacy of Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation methods in teaching vocabulary to elementary Iranian EFL learners. To do so, based on the true experimental method, a pretest posttest procedure was administered. Analysis of the results in the posttest revealed significant differences between communicative group and semantic group, on the one hand, and between these groups and the control group, on the other hand. The results showed that though both communicative and semantic translation methods enhanced vocabulary development of the learners, communicative translation method seemed to be more effective than the semantic one. That is, communicative group outperformed the other two groups significantly. Hence, it was concluded that the contribution of communicative translation method in teaching vocabulary items to elementary Iranian EFL students led to a higher level of vocabulary improvement. The study can also be helpful in establishment of Persian equivalents in teaching vocabulary in EFL settings.

Translatologists have tried to take advantage of scientific models to escape from the diversity of personal ideas to assess the quality of a piece of translation. One of those models is Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. In this paper the researcher has chosen “Uncle Willy” by William Faulkner and analysed its transitivity patterns, to find out the writer’s style, based on Halliday’s six processes and compared it with those of the translated text. The results show that the translator has emphasized the writer’s materialistic point of view and has decreased the relational interactions between the characters of the story in the interests of their mental actions. This has caused relational actions to happen in regard to dialogues while in ST more verbal actions happen in characters’ mind. And the existential aspect of the story has taken a stronger colour.

This article focuses upon the verbal voice in Kizombo (H.16h), also known in Bantu literature as verbal derivation. The voice is a grammatical category which allows speakers to elaborate strategies to connect the sets of themes roles and the grammatical relations. We discuss the extensions that decrease the valency: passive, reciprocal, reflexive, stative and the middle one. The goal is to understand and explain how Kizombo allows the opposition between the active and the passive; how reciprocal and reflexive are expressed in Kizombo by describing the participants in the event. In the grammatical theory, reciprocal and reflexive are discussed under the theory of bound anaphora, while Bantu languages studies claim that reflexivization was a process that reduces the structure of arguments and thus, deserves an independent treatment (Cf. Chomsky 1981, Nurse and Philippson 2006: 76; Mchombo 2004.:102 seq., Mchombo 2004:102 Apud Matsinde 1994) . What is the rationality of describing them together? Through description, we discuss the extensions one by one and the opposition between active and passive occurs by grammatical and semantic functions of participants. As for the reciprocal and reflexive, their extensions were distinctly well established. It was possible to see that these extensions reduces de valency.

The current study contended with studying explicitation phenomenon in a Farsi-English corpus. For doing so, five anecdotes selected at random from Sa'di's Golestan and their English translations extorted from "Sadi's Gulistan or Flower Garden" by James Ross (1890) were analyzed. In view of that, the researchers went through the anecdotes and their translations to extort the explicitation cases occurred through the procedure of translation. The result of the study showed explicitation has been used in the translations.

This study deals with the process of local assimilation of consonants in Kurdish. It is conducted within the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory(OT). The study hypothesizes that among the constraints of local assimilation , markedness is more dominant than faithfulness. It is also claimed that local assimilation can be found within a word and not necessarily between word boundaries. The paper is divided into three main sections; the first section addresses the main concepts and trends concerned with optimality theory. The second section deals with assimilation, its main concepts and categories. The third section shows the cases of local assimilation of consonants in Kurdish within the framework of OT. The sample of the study are all taken from (Sorani Kurdish- the semi standard dialect in Kurdish Language) from written and oral sources.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse-analytical research that primarily investigates the way ideology, dominance, social power abuse, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk (and, more recently, through visual images, sound and other forms of semiosis in the social and political context. This entails a diversity of approaches to CDA research, drawing on various linguistic analytic techniques and different social theories, although all involve some form of close textual (and/or multimodal) analysis. This paper attempts to provide an overview of CDA, the multiple meanings of CDA, and the most important models of CDA, namely Critical Linguistics and Social Model, Relational-Dialectic Model, Socio-cognitive Model, and Discourse-Historical Model.

This study investigated the translation of taboos from English into Persian in dramas from a skopos-based view. To carry out this study, ten dramas were chosen. Five out of these ten dramas were not performed on any stage in Iran, but the remaining five dramas were performed on the stage. The researcher chose randomly thirty taboos used in current English and Persian. Then, the obtained taboos were evaluated based on the strategies proposed by Robinson (2006). So, the statistical calculations showed that the most common strategy used for translating taboos by the Persian translators was censorship; there was no difference between translations of taboos in these two categories of dramas, because skopos had no effect on them. Finally, some interference occurred through translation of taboos into Persian.

This study was designed at investigating the relationship between the color of the sheet on which the act of translating is done and translation quality. To achieve this purpose, at first 180 B. A. students majoring in Translation selected randomly from Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran and Zand Institute of Higher Education. For the purpose of homogenizing the students’ knowledge of translation in the posttest, a pre-test was given to the students and after that 50 of these students whose scores were in the same range were selected and divided into experimental and control groups. The experimental group involved the students who translated the text on blue paper and the control group consisted of those who translated on white paper. Next the translations were assessed by three evaluators and the mean scores of the experimental and the control groups were then calculated individually by the researchers. To analyze the data, an independent sample t-test was used to see the mean difference of two groups. The results of the study indicated that the mean score of the students who translated on blue paper was higher than the mean score of those who translated on white paper but the difference was not significant (Sig. = 0.690). It means that according to the statistical analysis, the color of the sheet on which the act of translating was done had no significant effect on translation quality.

Translation of literary texts in general and poetry in particular as a distinctive type of translation has been of great importance since the early appearance of translations. On the one hand, the difficulty of translating the metrical pattern and on the other hand the nature of poetry itself has turned the poetry translation a very controversial issue and there have been done many investigations on its different aspects. When it comes to rendering the very spirit of masterpieces like Shahnameh, poetry translation becomes so much trickier. This study aimed to analyze the story of The Seven Stages of Esfandyar in Shahnameh in terms of figures of speech to realize that how the figures of speech are transferred or lost in the English translation of Shahnameh. To this end, First 10 verses of the story of The Seven Stages of Esfandyar which were selected according to the degree of frequency of figures of speech and also the translation of the selected verses were studied, each of them were analyzed separately by identifying figures of speech. Then the type and number of figures of speech in the source text were compared with those of the target text. The findings indicated that there was about 50% loss in Warner & Warner's Translation of Figures of speech in the selected verses of the story of the seven stages of Esfandiyar in Shahnameh.

There is no doubt that the world is constantly developing in terms of technology. This technological development had caused a drastic linguistic problem of addressing the expanding wave of newly coined concepts and technologies for which no equivalents in Persian used to exist. To preserve and help strengthen the existing Persian Language terminology, Iran’s Academy of Persian Language and Literature started to introduce Persian equivalents for English terminologies of chemistry in 1997. Thenceforth the Academy has introduced at least twenty thousands of Persian equivalents in various fields, but Iranian translators seem to be reluctant about using these newly introduced terminologies. However, no scientific study has investigated the usability and acceptability of these Persian equivalences to the date. To investigate whether the Persian equivalents introduced by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature are really in use or not, the present study first compiled a list of 100 terminologies of chemistry introduced by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. Then the Persian translations of 10 English books on the related filed were investigated to gather the Persian equivalents Iranian translators had used in their translations for the terminologies under the study. Besides, the translation procedures adopted by translators for translating the terminologies under the study were investigated too. The study revealed that most Iranian translators still do not welcome the Persian equivalents introduced by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature and prefer to borrow the original English terminologies through different translation procedures. In addition, the study showed that in most cases, 71 cases out of the total of 100 cases, Iranian translators had used equivalents other than the ones the Academy of Persian Language and Literature had introduced which in turn indicates that Iran’s Academy of Persian Language and Literature has failed to reach its goal of providing acceptable and usable Persian equivalents for English terminologies of chemistry.