TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2004 | Volume:2 | Issue:5|Papers Count:6

The textual organization of a sentence is the result of a mutual interaction between the two parallel and interrelated systems functionally labeled as "information and thematic structures". In any given context, the speaker/writer decides to choose among various thematic/informational patterns and tries, through mapping one structure on the other, to achieve discourse "textuality". Different patterns of thematic/informational mappings may be affected by the so-called "tone groups" resulting in marked structures of different degrees typically carrying implicit meanings or special functions. Such structures are of a great significance in translation so that the way they are treated in the target text can make a basis for evaluating the overall translator's performance in achieving "functional/pragmatic equivalence". Since the information organization of a sentence is typically realized through the speaker's speech and since there is normally no speaker/writer present to read over his/her written text, it is the reader/translator's own reading(interpretation)that helps rendering the various patterns of information distribution in micro-linguistic terms. This is exactly where the translation process may face some serious challenges.

One of the liveliest ongoing debates concerning research on interpreting is the issue of language-specific structural asymmetries as a point to be taken into consideration in the process of simultaneous interpreting. The traditional approach to the aforementioned issue is pioneered by Seleskovitch and Lederer who reject the role of typological differences. Quite contrarily, the current view advocated by information-processing (IP) theorists looks at the typological differences of the two language pairs with more dilated eyes and assumes some difficulty emanating from the left-branching and especially verb-last structure of the input language in the SI process. This study is designed to investigate the significant relation(s) between Persian SOV word order and Persian-English simultaneous interpreting. To this end, a contrastive and exploratory analysis of the two languages was conducted. A corpus consisting of several speakers "inputs along with their synchronized interpreters" outputs were collected and meticulously compared so as to find out whether the Persian-English interpreters adopt any strategies in connection with the verb-last word order of Persian, and if so, what strategies and to what extent.

This paper is an attempt to shed light on questions such as culture, translation and the strategies used for translating culture -specific items (CSIs). Examples of culture-specific items are presented following which the strategies and processes developed and employed in order to produce an acceptable translation in the target language of CSIs found in the source language texts will be discussed. The paper concludes presenting instances of extreme adjustment and adaptation of CSIs found in the western literature as were translated by Iranian translators during Qajar Era in late 19thcentury and early 20thc century.

Intelligibility of the meaning, normality of the style, and naturalness of the language all are of prime importance in translated texts, but they are not the only factors to be taken into account in evaluating a translation. The original text is considered as the keystone in assessing the accuracy and adequacy of a translated text. It may happen that a translation is clear and intelligible in its meaning, normal in its style, and natural in its language, but does not correspond to the original in the content of the message. That is, neither the intelligibility nor the naturalness of a translation is a sign of its faithfulness to the original. This study is an attempt to discuss the significance of accuracy, clarity and naturalness in religious translations in order to find out how much these criteria are important and influential in evaluating such translations.

This article aims at introducing a rather brand new model to score a translation more objectively than before. Here, the three key concepts of accuracy, clarity and naturalness have been discussed and exemplified in details. Also, a number of mathematical parametric values have been applied to the three criteria of the study; then the formulaic representation, including some equations, have been elaborated on. It should be noted that the applicability scope of this model is not ample enough to cover a wide range of units of translation, however, its main concern in terms of translation testing is to state that it is rather unfair to claim that scoring a piece of translation objectively is completely impossible. Attempts have been made here to explain everything in a straightforward and understandable language so that the readership would be able to follow the topics without any problem.

The purpose of this paper is to crystallize the nature of scientific texts from different perspectives and to illustrate how interaction is made between interlocutors in this respect. Doing so, we hope to shed light on the translation of English texts for specific purposes. As an introduction, the notion of translation is defined as a dynamic and process-oriented task; then methods of translation in general and technical translation in particular will be discussed It is essential to discuss the characteristics of technical texts in terms of generic, sociolinguistic, and linguistic factors involved in their evolution. An attempt will be made to clarify the problems the translators encounter in translating technical texts and their choices to tackle the issue on the basis of the appropriate text-types. Finally, some characteristics of efficient translators in facing with the respective difficulties will be elaborated.