TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2006 | Volume:4 | Issue:13|Papers Count:9

This paper intends to analyze the Iranian translators' attitudes in order to extract the principles and requirements for educational planning of translation within the framework of Richards and Rodgers' (2001) model. This model prepares the ground for a scientific language teaching method which is also applicable to translator training. It includes three stages of approach, design, and procedure. The approach deals with theories and beliefs about the nature of translation and the acquisition of translation competence. The design covers characteristics and kinds of objectives, the selection and sequence of contents, and the role of the teacher and the student. And in the procedure the kind of actual classroom activities and teaching methods are investigated. This paper has analyzed the Iranian translators' views through retrospection and interview. The results of the study reveal that 97% of the total 34 translators (in this survey) believe that there is a meaningful and positive relationship between the linguistic competence and translation competence. Moreover, 67.41 % of them maintain that there is a positive relationship between linguistic performance and translation performance. The nature of the data implies a cause and effect relationship between the variables which should not be ignored in the process of educational planning in translation.    

This study is intended as a foray into thematic patterns and developments of Theme-Rheme structures of the text, with the eventual aim of exploring what happens to the English news texts (STs) when they are rendered into their counterpart Persian texts (TTs). This paper is also an attempt to shed light on Fries's (1995) first hypothesis that 'different patterns of thematic progression correlate with different genres'. For this purpose, ten VOA's (Voice of America) news reports were randomly assigned and carefully analyzed in association with their respective Persian news reports rendered and produced by Persian speaking staff of VOA. It was made clear, then, that the thematic structures of the TTs are basically similar to those of the STs. Furthermore, most of the texts (news genre) turned out to be in harness with a specific pattern of thematic progression, namely, 'a progression of Themes derived from a general notion'. Some hypotheses are posited, at the end, which, it is hoped, could be taken as perspectives for further research.  

This paper is a study of the ideas of translation and the original text in the writings of Jacques Derrida in order to explicate the curious relation of the original to the translation and ask the following question: Does translation give the original an after-life and enable it to survive, or does it instead 'kill' the original and substitute it with a decayed text? Jacques Derrida, in turn, takes two main themes from Benjamin's essay and gives these terms a more generalized meaning: Derrida examines the notions of the 'kinship of languages' and 'survival' in the act of translation and then situates them within his new definition of the 'text'. I would argue that Derrida sees translation as inevitable. Translation is inevitable in the sense that the translation preserves the multiple meanings of the original text and in turn demands more translations to create more multiple meanings. Translation as an act of interpretation makes every text prone to multiple translations none more authoritative than the other, but the texts demand translation as it is the secret to their survival. In a roundtable on the question of translation and Benjamin, Derrida recapitulates his reading of Benjamin's theory of language. He speaks of a 'mutual contract' between the translation and the original in general terms. The translation and the original not only demand one another and suspend each other's decay but they also enable language to survive through this symbiotic relationship.    

This paper tries to study some advantages and disadvantages of machine translation in comparison with human translation. It is believed that using computers in translation is not a threat for the livelihood of the human translator, but using machine translation as well as translation tools including translation memory can accelerate translation process and prevent translating repetitive, time-consuming and boring texts. Two criteria, need and use, have been considered to compare relative quality of machine translation and human translation. Each of these two kinds of translation can be selected according to the type of demand. Machine translation with the goal of lowering linguistic barriers between nations can have a very effective role in dialogue among civilizations and communities having different languages and cultures.  

In this paper, various strategies employed for the speech act of compliments in Persian and English are studied and some examples of cultural misunderstandings that may happen to be troublesome in translation of compliments exchanges in English and Persian contexts will be presented. The present study of compliments in Persian and English shows that the use of polite expressions is mostly less positive in Persian in comparison with those of English. Moreover, Persian speakers seem to be more modest, indirect ambiguous, lengthy and obscure than the English ones. Besides, Persian speakers, unlike the English ones, as a socio-cultural norm, mostly have the tendency to leave the compliments somewhat vague and avoid assertive statements and all these differences may bring about negative transfer in the process of translation of from L1 to L2 and vice versa. To bridge between socio-pragmatics and interpretation/translation fields, the present study will try to open perspectives on a better understanding of underlying universal social and linguistic conventions in both Persian and English cultures. Furthermore, such a study can provide us with valuable information on cross-cultural problems concerning the translation of speech act of compliments in English and Persian and therefore prove of extremely value to both fields of Translation and TESOL.    

This paper tries to introduce the notion of 'abstract representation', one of the key notions in Machine Translation (MT).This aim is going to be gained through giving some examples of abstract representation which have been found in different references. In the first systems of MT, experts in computer sciences and linguists tried to use 'abstract representation' to give a proper translation, but because of the complexity of this notion and the problems which early computers faced, some of them decided to forsake 'abstract representation' totally. They started using methods without abstract representation such as example-based and statistical approaches, but after a while, these methods, too, failed to solve the problem. Today again, the latest methods of machine translation are trying to apply 'abstract representation' besides new findings of other methods to solve the problems of machine translation.              

The Holy Our'an has been revealed in the Arabic language, utilized its linguistic mechanism and at the same time has its own linguistic and non-linguistic peculiarities. As a book of guidance, the Noble Our'an has been sent down to show the way of life to every Muslim, and if its guidelines are followed, to guarantee their life to come. Unfortunately, not all Muslims know the Arabic language to gain access even to its literal meaning. Many of them have to resort to its translations to understand the surface meaning: It is a pity that nearly all these translations suffer from different kinds of shortcomings. Some of these deficiencies are due to overlooking the role that applied linguistics, contrastive linguistics and translation theories play in translating from one language to another. This article is an attempt to shed light on the application of Grice's Conversation Implicature on the processes of understanding the divine message and its rendering into another language.    

This article aims at investigating multiple dimensions of the scientific study of translation. The question this study tries to answer is whether it is possible to study translation scientifically assuming different levels of study that can be comprehensive enough to provide us with the label Translatics'. To answer this question, the term 'Linguistics' - the scientific study of language - has been elaborated on, then, new levels of study have been defined for translation via a sort of comparison with linguistics levels. Furthermore, any technical discussion has been avoided to maintain the straightforwardness of the argumentation.