Linguistics & Translation

The paper looks at some issues in vocabulary teaching in L2 situation. Such issues include learner’s vocabulary size for both productive and receptive use of L2, basic vocabulary skills, techniques and procedures for vocabulary teaching.

This paper seeks to delineate the constraints imposed on translators of movie dialogues in the context of Iran. The movie ''Platoon'' is selected for this purpose. In this situation a myriad of external constraints, that is, cultural, religious, and political, lead to rewriting or manipulation of movie texts. This is an effective means for creating and naturalizing ideologies, through expurgation, derogation, etc. The movie translations in Iran are scenes of ideological incursions in translation, that is, suppression of dialectal features. They are sites of ideological clashes in which certain realities are constructed and challenged and xenophobic attitudes are propagated. The translators counterfeit realities and inculcate them in the innocent audience. This paper explores the ideological and socio-political factors which determine the strategies applied in the translation of western movies.

On the idea of a theory is the title of a paper written by Andrew Chesterman (2007), a great scholar in the realm of Translation Studies (TS). The paper has been published in the journal of Across languages and Cultures, a leading journal in Translation Studies. There are many concepts in Translation Studies (TS) which have been given different definitions. There is no consistent terminology. One can pay attention to different definitions of the key concepts of “translation”, “equivalence” and “strategy”.

This research discusses the English listening comprehension problems of university international students from China. The research used a qualitative method to collect data from three China’s students taking English Listening Comprehension (ELC) in University Sains Malaysian (USM). This study is a research report related to the problems encounter by China’s students in ELC learning. Interview was conducted to investigate students’ perspective through the main question concerning the problems from the China’s students in their ELC self-learning process in three steps, which is the pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. Findings from this study indicated that the main problem faced by the China’s students was the lack of prior knowledge in English vocabulary, this inhibit their understanding in the listening process. Moreover, the differences in the ascent of the native speakers prohibit the proper understanding of the listening content, the short span of concentration, and the learning habit of China’s students were discussed as the problems of the ELC learning. This enhances the data availability and the interpretative analysis. In order to validate the data and the analysis, researcher experiences and documents analysis were conducted. This research laid a good foundation for further research; it provided useful information concerning the effective strategies to enhance students’ listening skills and will improve the instruction of English listening class to achieve the win-win situation.

Writing through an organized model and using the most frequent structural patterns as the proficient writers in different sorts of writings has always been worthy of attention. It can be said that narratives are nearly the most common and prevalent sort of writing in Iran. From the primary school, students are being asked to jot down their experiences of a specific occasion or holiday (e.g. Norouz holiday, summer holiday); however, little attention has been paid to the way students have to organize their writings and the kind of referencing has been taken for granted. The connectedness and cohesion of any text in all languages is granted, not mention the fact that coherence is the prerequisite to that. Using cohesive devices, which referencing is one of them, helps the writer to keep the cohesion. Looking for the differences in the commonality of the existence of cataphora and anaphora, we are going to come up with the most prevalent type of referencing, in order to help students to write in the most common way. Cataphora is usually defined as the referential relation in which the element referred to is anticipated by the referring element, usually a pronoun, and anaphora is a linguistic relation between two textual entities which is defined when a textual entity (the anaphor) refers to another entity of the text which usually occurs before (the antecedent). Two English and Persian contemporary short stories have been waded through to discover the most common pattern in terms of using anaphora and cataphora referencing in English writing. Ten English narrative essays and ten Persian narrative essays have been analyzed too for the same purpose. In the end, the results tend to show that anaphoric referencing comparing to cataphoric one is more prevalent in Persian narratives comparing to English ones. Of course, if we consider the frequency of anaphoric and cataphoric referencing, anaphora is more common in both languages; however, it is more common in Persian, as we see rare samples of cataphoric referencing in Persian, while there are more samples of cataphoric referencing in English narratives.

Everything in this universe is perpetually in a state of change. In fact, we live in fluctuating world, nothing stays still. Language like everything else joins in this general flux. These changes may occur in all aspects of a language: in pronunciation, in syntax and in lexicon. Of these three areas lexical changes are the most noticeable and may be observed almost daily. An important type of lexical change in any language is lexical borrowing. This research intended to investigate whether these new substitute words have been accepted by educated people or not. The research also intended to see whether there is any difference among students of Persian, English and Arabic literature in their familiarity with and use of these new words or not. In so doing, three groups of educated students at the university of Isfahan participated in the study. Each group consisted of 30 male students, studying English, Persian, and Arabic literature. A list of 163 substituted words for the borrowed foreign words presented to them. They were asked to mark the word which they use more frequently in spoken and written form of language to see which form, the borrowed form or the substituted form, is used more frequently and also by which group. The results show that the borrowed words are used more frequently than substituted words by all of the three groups. It is suggested that the language planners include the substitute words in high school books to get more fruitful results and we hope it finds its place among our people very soon!

The study was intended to investigate effects of pre-task and online task planning on IELTS Task 1 Academic Writing grammar. Forty five Iranian prospective IELTS candidates were randomly placed in three groups of Pre-task planning (PTP), Online-task planning (OTP), and Control group. In PTP, the required structures were given to the participants before the introduction of the task and then participants were asked to write the task. In OTP, as the instructor was presenting the different parts of the task, he introduced the relevant structures as well. For example, he explained the introduction and immediately he presented the types of structures candidates were supposed to write. In the control group, no planning of any sort was presented. The one-way ANOVA for the Grammatical Range and Accuracy (GRA) showed that there was a highly significant difference between the performance of both PTP and OTP participants compared with those of the control group. Comparing the performance of PTP and OTP participants, however, it was shown that the former got higher GRA scores than the latter. The results of the study indicate that presentation of grammatical structure prior to the presentation of the task can help IELTS Task 1 candidates get higher scores.

This paper investigates how marked structures in an English literary text are translated into its Persian equivalents. The research questions in this paper focus on the problematic differences between the translation of thematic sentences from English into Persian. In doing so, a corpus of English novelistic prose (The Heart of Darkness) was investigated along with its Persian translation. The model guiding the analysis was Nida’s notion of dynamic equivalence, which specifically emphasizes the effects that a translated text has on its target audience. To conduct the analysis, five categories of thematized sentences (passive, adjunct front, cleft, pseudo-cleft, topicalized) were considered. Results showed that passivation was the most frequently used thematized structure among the categories. Furthermore, it was found that translator had rendered original marked structures in the English text into both marked and unmarked Persian structures.

Language as a representation of fundamental concepts and ideas has been studied and thought worthy Crystallized thoughts, beliefs and convictions of language in different kind of languages are one of the main foci which noticed in many humanity subjects. In recent years, our knowledge and understanding of multiple aspects of “relationship” has been increased because of many investigations of language behavior. (Wales 1990); translation process is a language process which is set between two languages so understanding and recognizing it is much harder and simple conception (the only means to ignore all the elements that are involved in any cases), regardless of background, effects of relationship and the position will be like a lion with not mane and tail. Author, reader and text have features that considering to them is necessary in understanding and transferring the text message correctly; we will have different complications, even if we believe that the translation is reversing the words and patterns because, because the set of elements and syntactic patterns are very extensive and each element has its own complex problems. Translation does not mean only entering new concepts of source language to the target language yea it is a cultural, social and communicational phenomenon that should be studied independently and descriptively. Translator slowly changes phenomena and creates the new phenomena such as the author that we often don’t recognize the meaning changes due to the collection changes.

The purpose of the study was to establish English student teachers’ knowledge of writing strategies to facilitate instruction of writing skills. The specific objectives were: to find out introduction strategies used by participants when writing essays, to establish strategies used by participants to ensure coherence of the written essay and to examine conclusion strategies used by the participants in essay writing. A total of 37 fourth year English student teachers’ were used in the study. The instrument used for data generation was document analysis of written essays. The study revealed that the student teachers lack sufficient knowledge of writing strategies. The study recommends that: English Language Teacher Educators should design a course about communication strategies for effective essay writing to be taught to student teachers specializing in English to equip them with both content and pedagogical knowledge for effective teaching. Examining of the course should include writing essays to motivate students to practice and master writing strategies for effective communication. English language teacher educators should coordinate and ensure that the content courses taught by other schools apart from the school of education are relevant and meet the needs of English Language Teaching in Kenya.