TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2012 | Volume:9 | Issue:36|Papers Count:12

Theories of translation are either reductionist or holistic. While reductionist theories only cover some specific areas, holistic theories cover all kinds of translations. Skopos theory is one of the holistic theories of translation. This study explores this theory and some of its aspects. At first, we examine the status of translation and translational action from Jean-Rene Ladmiral perspective. Then we investigate some theorists' views on Skopos theory and we see which characteristics of translation are important in their views.

In the past, academic texts were encouraged to be as objective and impersonal as possible. However, new researches on stance, metadiscourse, modality, hedging, evaluation and appraisal have shown that academic and scientific writings have a varying degree of subjectivity that helps them relate to the reader, make compelling arguments as well as space for new knowledge. This degree of subjectivity differs among disciplines. The current study, applied the Appraisal theory of Martin and White (2005) to a parallel corpus of original and translated MA and PhD dissertation abstracts in social and natural sciences to find out how writers explicitly project their attitude into the texts and how these explicit attitudinal markers change in the course of translation. To study the changes, an ex post facto categorization of changes to attitude was constructed and qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data were carried out. Results were studied in comparison between languages and disciplines. It was found that social sciences drew on attitudinal markers significantly more than natural sciences. Results also showed that social sciences underwent more changes in attitude than natural sciences. The most frequent types of changes in attitude in different disciplines were recognized and illustrated by instances from the corpus. It was concluded that, in general, regarding attitude, translated abstracts were highly distorted. Finally, pedagogical implications were provided, calling for attention to attitude markers in translation and supervision on translated abstracts.

In translation criticism the critic deals with two texts: the original and the target. In this process, the target text is contrasted with the original, and then the good and weak points are dealt with on the basis of translation principles and theories. Some grammatical and linguistic weak points can be found and improved even without contrast, but the keystone for investigating the accuracy of the meaning in the target text is the original.In literary criticism a speech is evaluated according to its literary aspects, and a critic may criticize a literary text from different points of view, such as literary style, and ethical, social, economical, political, historical, cultural and religious aspects, as well as in accordance with the level of knowledge and thought of the speaker.In the present article the emphasis is put on this point that personal view of the critic will always have its effect on both translation and literary criticism. Therefore, it should be said that different persons may criticize a literary text or translation differently due to their different personal notions.

The present article introduces a three dimensional model for translation criticism inspired by critical discourse analysis. It assumes that unlike translation quality assessment which rests on value judgments, translation criticism needs to explore the ideological implications of translational choices and how they represent identities in target societies. Based on the concept of intersexuality, the model examines the metatext in relation to its corresponding prototext at three levels: the textual, the paratextual and the semiotic.

As the possibility of the occurrence of hybridity in written translation was a heated discussion, it was not inconceivable to think about the occurrence of hybridity in subtitling, as a type of translation stemming from audiovisual family, as well. However, despite the important role of hybridity in movies as an instrument of globalization, the frequent types of manifestation through which hybridity exhibited in subtitles were not clear. This paper, being a summary of a comprehensive study based on a quite large corpus of 2400 minutes of movies, aimed at finding frequent manifestations of hybridity, either linguistic or cultural, in subtitles. The findings indicated that “Name and Date” was the most frequent manifestation of hybridity; and the majority of the hybrid elements were cultural. Contemporary intercultural communication was also the major factor in the production of these hybrid elements.

The present paper gives an account of the role humor plays in the synchronization of cartoons in Iran and offers insights into possible regularities resulting from humor as the skopos of translation in different types of synchronization, based on Chaume’s typology which includes lip synchrony, isochrony, kinetic synchrony and character synchrony. This is a descriptive study which analyzes the corpus from a qualitative perspective. The corpus of the study involves one of the well-known works of Glory Entertainment Company, dubbed from English into Persian, namely Kung Fu Panda. The analysis shows that humor stands as a determining factor underlying synchronization decisions. Analysis of the corpus also revealed that humor is improved upon in the dubbed version of cartoons.

There are various procedures proposed by translation scholars for translating proper nouns. However, there is still a strong tendency among most Persian translators to transfer (transcribe, transliterate, copy) proper nouns in fantastic novels. Some studies have been carried out on such tendency or the various procedures available but none has focused on the “metaphoric” and “iconic” functions of proper nouns. Studying the translation procedures adopted by Saeed Kebriai and Morteza Madaninezhad in translating Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone novel into Persian, the present paper attempts to explore the transfer of proper nouns in terms of two of Berman's deforming tendencies: “qualitative impoverishment” and “the destruction of underlying networks of signification”.

Over the last ten years or so, the translator's workplace has changed. Dictionaries have limitations in providing all possible equivalents, enough authentic examples of the word usage, enough options for solving translation problems, and there are difficulties in searching them. However, modern technology opens new horizons to translating in a more comfortable situation introducing the enormous amount of data and higher speed. In this study it has been tried to compare the quality of translations produced with and without the help of the parallel corpus to see whether using a parallel corpus in translating has any effect on the output quality of translations made by translation students. The results show that all students achieved 55% improvement in the translation with the help of corpus which is very encouraging. Students of translation can get ideas from this study to use corpora in translation to increase the quaality and speed of their work.

This paper is an attempt to identify the possible problems concerning lexical gaps that translators may encounter while translating literary texts. To this end, literary texts and their translations were searched for the domains in which CS/s could be found; they were then analysed and the strategies which were applied by the translators to solve the problems were identified.Usually where there is a cultural focus, there is a translation problem due to the possible cultural gap or distance between source language and target language. Some words and phrases are so heavily and exclusively grounded in one culture that they seem almost impossible to translate into another. Translators are faced with the problem of finding adequate equivalents for the language-specific words; therefore, they search for strategies to cope with these problems and aim at finding a way to express the important meaning components of the word or phrase.

In the present study, ' translation of implicatures' as a challenging issue in Translation Studies is addressed. The researchers' main concern is to investigate the translation procedures proposed by Newmark in translation of implicatures including literal translation, expansion, modulation, transposition, equivalence, and omission in novels. At the preliminary stage, four questions were raised to detect the translation procedures adopted by the translators and to find the most frequent translation procedure used in translation of implicatures. To this end, a famous English novel, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyr, and its two best-seller Persian translations by Mehdi Afshar and Mohammad Taghi Bahrami Harran were chosen to be analyzed. Through a contrastive analysis, seventy four implicatures were extracted from the novel and its two translations and were analyzed. The obtained results of this analysis demonstrated that the most frequent translation procedure adopted by the translators was literal translation.

Metaphor, as an often troublesome figure of speech for translators, is treated in different ways in translation. These treatments are influenced by the translators' understanding of the sense or image of the metaphor in question. The present study attempts to investigate if the cognitive processes in a translator's mind, including his cultural or linguistic knowledge, generate a corresponding metaphoric translation. Ten MA students of English translation were selected as sample translators and were given 20 metaphors contextualized in sentences to translate. They were asked to think aloud while trying to translate the sentences. The results showed that what automatically passed through their minds did not necessarily engender a corresponding translation in terms of sense or image. It appears that cultural and linguistic constraints affecting cognitive processes significantly differ from the cultural or linguistic constraints on the actual product of translation.