Translation Studies
Year:2010 | Volume:8 | Issue:31|Papers Count:8

Concepts like "faithful" versus "transparent", "honest" versus "comprehensible" and many other binary terms have always been controversial in the theory and practice of translation. The origin of these controversies can be found in whether or not we allow modification in translation. In general, modifications imply any alteration or manipulation in the form of the source text in order to properly convey the meaning Into the target language.This paper aims to study the relation between modification (discoursal and lexical) in translation and the image schemata that exist in the minds of receivers. Image Schemata refer to the abstract mental structures formed through our interactions with the outside physical world around us, or as a result of social conventions. These abstract patterns play a crucial role in our understanding, reasoning, and conceptualization of phenomena. It is concluded that at a general level all kinds of modifications in translation are implemented in line with image schemata.

Translation involves a mediating language. To better understand the nature of translation, one first needs to know what language itself is since translation is above all rendering one form of language into another. It has also been argued that text comprehension is a prerequisite for text production, a technical version of which is translation; hence an appraisal of the process of discourse comprehension appears vital for understanding the processes at work in translation. It is accordingly the aim of this paper to first clarify the meaning and nature of language itself. Then, the factors involved in text comprehension will be delineated with a particular focus on the relationship between text and context - since as House rightly asserts, ' the notion of context, its relation to text, and the role it plays in translation has received much less attention' - in an attempt to pave the way for the first step of translation, i.e., comprehension, to gain realisation in as uninterrupted a way as possible, since otherwise, no acceptable translation may follow.

Persian language like any other language has been and is affected by foreign languages. Language of Persian media has been affected in the same way. The question here is how this language has been shaped and taken its present form; and whether journalistic language changes too and the language that present journalists use is different from that of a few decades ago. The answer is that in the process of changing and reforming the journalistic language the effect of translation should not be ignored.And, since one of the most important purposes of collective media, including newspaper, is reflecting political events, it is clear that the effect on this media of other languages is more obvious in politics than in other kinds of news. Considering the fact that lexicon is an important part of any language, the present article is an attempt to explore those political words that are tainted by translation. The examined words in this paper are taken from political news and articles that have been translated from French journals and printed in Ettelaat newspaper from 1341 (1962 CE) to 1344 (1965 CE).

Most academic and scientific writing is nowadays done in English and students are therefore required to read books and do assignments using this medium. The present research was aimed at a comparative study of reading comprehension of EAP original texts and their translations. As many as 50 MA students, majoring in different branches of management, were randomly selected. Out of these 50 students, 30 were asked to take an English reading comprehension test, consisting of 15 multiple-choice questions - 4 questions addressed main ideas of passages to measure global understanding and 11 measured local understanding. The rest of the students took the same reading test for the Persian translations of the same passages; they also took a Nelson test so that their homogeneity in terms of language proficiency would be ensured. The results indicated that the students tended to understand main ideas of the English texts better than those of their translations; however, as regards details, this was not true; i.e., they did not understand details of English texts better than those of Persian translations.The findings suggest that the process of transfer from SL to TL mainly affects the finding of complete equivalences for main ideas, rather than details, due to the fact that the former are higher-order propositions and usually operate at textual level.

This paper attempts to find out whether the personal writing style of a writer can affect his/her translation. To find an answer to this question, the writing style and translations of two writers, with distinguished writing style, are studied: from Simin Daneshvar, an original novel named "Souvashoon" as well as the translation of "The scarlet letter" and from Ahmad Shamlou, some short stories from the collection "the doors and walls of China's great wall" and the translation of "the little prince". The findings of the research indicate that the writing style of a writer-translator is transferred to his translation (s).

The present study focused on investigating the strategies used in translating humor. To this end, two English texts along with their corresponding translations into Persian were studied using Delabastita's translation strategies of wordplay (1996).The results indicated that the most commonly used strategies by Iranian translators were: 1. rendering the humor of the source text into a humor in the target language, and 2. omission, and the least commonly used ones were 1.editorial techniques, and 2. literal rendering of the source text humor in the target language. The results also indicated that taboo humors were mostly translated either by omitting the taboo term in the humor or by rendering the humor into non-humor. It was also found that most of the humorous elements related to political events were much easier to be translated into another language with no change in the elements of humor.

This study explores differing ways the meaning of Russian verbs with prefix «-ᴨo» can be conveyed in Persian. The difficulty students experience when translating such verbs into Persian encouraged the researchers to conduct the present study. In effect, the main source of difficulty is the fact that when prefix «-ᴨo» is attached to the stem of verbs, it can convey different meanings.Since in Persian we do not have too many of such prefixes and they cannot express the grammatical function of words either, both lexical and grammatical meanings of the prefix «-ᴨo» are translated into Persian using features other than prefixes. It is worth mentioning that when prefix «-ᴨo» is attached to Russian verbs, they can express several meanings simultaneously, whereas Persian verbs rarely have such quality.

The present research is an attempt to investigate the cases of censorship in dubbed movies shown on TV in Iran - namely "Godfather" series, and to construct the norms based on which the whole system operates to apply this strategy in AVT as a mode of translation. Adopting Toury's Descriptive Translation Studies and Even Zohar's Polysystem Theory, this descriptive study tried to find the answer to the following questions: What are the most common manifestations of censorship in Persian dubbed movies on Iranian TV? Are they rule-governed? In what ways.What are the determining factors in the application of censorship? Are they ideological? Does censorship cause any significant change in the entire meaning of the film.If yes, how much?After collection of relevant data, they were analyzed using translation shifts, for it seems that censorship is a kind of shift in ideology. As a result, units of analysis ranged from censorship of the scenes to censorship of the words uttered.