TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2007 | Volume:5 | Issue:19|Papers Count:8

Translating allusion is one of the most challenging tasks to be performed by a translator. Allusions are potential problems of translation process due to the fact that they have particular connotations and implications in the source language (SL) and the foreign culture (Fe)but not necessarily in the TL and the domestic culture. Taking this into consideration, the present paper aims at touching upon the rendering of proper name allusions (PNs) in the Gulistan of Sa'di (1213) in five English translations by R. Anderson (1861), E. Rehatsek (1956), Easlwick (1852), R. Burton (1842), and J. Ross (1839). The paper probes different strategies employed by the translators of Gulistan to help the TL readers to perceive the implied and associational meanings of proper names in Sa'di' s masterpiece. After tracing the PNs in the Gulistan and identifying their equivalents in the five English translations, the model of Leppihalme (1997) was applied to the collected data in order to find out which strategies have been preferred by each of the translators and why. Central to the study is the analysis of the significance of "retention" as the most frequently used strategy here for tackling such elements.

The present study investigates the application of norms in subtitling of some Iranian and American films. The questions this study seeks to answer are: what norms are applied in subtitling of Iranian and American films? And what are the similarities and differences between the norms applied in subtitling of Iranian and American films? In this article, a short theoretical discussion will be given about the main topics: audiovisual translation, especially subtitling, and norms. The material for the study consists of 5 Iranian films subtitled in English and 5 American films subtitled in English. Considering translation as a norm-governed activity, the researcher’s main concern has been studying norms applied in the translation of some challenging concepts including culture-specific items, verbal visual signs and language varieties. By nature, this research is descriptive which is aimed at comparing the Iranian and American subtitled films with the focus on normative patterns governing their translation process. As in the Field of translation studies norms are frequently used patterns, through this research some patterns applied by translators in the course of translating challenging concepts were extracted. The extracted patterns are: formal one replaces 1. the informal form; 2. The social dialect is rendered as it is uttered; 3. the local dialect is identified in brackets; 4. the CS item is replaced with a proper target CS item; 5. the CS item is manipulated to be understandable; 6. the CS item is preserved intact; 7. the CS item is omitted; 8. Verbal-visual signs are not subtitled; 9. songs are subtitled; 10. songs are not subtitled. Through this research the extracted patterns were considered the basis for analyzing the instances existing in the selected films.

Pronouns in translation, unlike other grammatical categories including nouns, verbs, etc are probably prone to be considered without drawback. But a close estimate of ad hoc features which pronouns conflate simultaneously, both in relation to language system and extralinguistic factors, reveals that it is almost a far-reaching goal to simply assume the proviso envisaged above. Due to their deictic meaning, pronouns, relate the text and context including place, time, etc which are responsible for different interpretations of the text. Pronouns have grammaticalized gender, case, and number differently in the languages of the world and their imposing role on syntax and morphological properties in some languages of the world has to be accounted for in translation. Moreover, social relations are categorized, in some languages including Persian, in pronouns or the pronoun system. Pronouns are not interpretable unless their antecedent be specified. The goal upon which this article seeks is to enumerate pronouns and their merits in translation, though particular attention is given to pronouns in divine sources.

Explicitation is the process of rendering explicit into a target language what is implicit on the linguistic surface of a source text. Being a general notion, explicitation is of different types, i.e. obligatory, optional, pragmatic, and translation-inherent, and occurs at different linguistic levels, e.g. grammatical, semantic and pragmatic. Taking Blum-Kulka's(1986) explicitation hypothesis as its starting point, this study focuses on intersentential elliptical structures as a potential source of explicitation. The objective of the study was to see how exploitation is dealt with in expressive and informative text-types. Thus, a corpus was compiled comprising in turn of two sub-corpora. One consisted of 3 English narratives along with their Persian translations, and was named corpus A. The other contained 3 psychological texts as well as their translations in Persian, and was named corpus B. These texts were taken to represent expressive and informative types of texts. The analyses were made on the first 200 translated sentences of each source text. Sentences, which had ellipses (nominal, verbal, and clausal), were first located in the original texts. Subsequently, their translations were identified in the target texts. Attention was then paid to see how exploitation behaved in these structures and in the two sub-corpora. Observations indicate that (1) informative texts tend to be explicit by nature, (2) they are far more explicit than expressive texts, and (3) in translation, too, the tendency to be explicitated is much higher in informative than in expressive texts.

This article first provides a definition of style, stylistic features and a method to recognize these features. Then different approaches to stylistics - structuralist linguistics, formalist linguistics, discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis - are introduced. Critical theory is compared with other linguistic schools in theory and practice. Then, various material, mental, relational, verbal, behavioral and existential processes, which are included in the ideational function of Haliday's systemic grammar, are illustrated with Persian examples.This paper aims at introducing a structural-functional model of textual stylistics that can be applied in critical theory.

There have been many terms incorporated into English as idiomatic expressions as a result of the mass media's mania for games and sporting events. Moreover, regarding the increasingly important role of games and sports in the development of global interactions and understanding among the world's nations, a mastery of terminology involved in every one of the sports seems indispensable. Sports terms, on the other hand, can present a challenge in the process of translation so that atranslator has to be very familiar with the regulations and jargon for different kinds of sports both in SL and TL.Sports terms and idioms can mostly embody duality of meaning. That is, sports terms and idioms can be interpreted as not only being related to the sporting event itself, but also as having something to do with non-sports situations such as business and social interactions. This duality of meaning is the main focus of the present study.If a translator understands the sport, the game and the way it is played, he/she will understand better the idiomatic expressions derived from these games and henceforth can produce a more successful translation out of the texts.

This study was carried out in the hope of proposing the most effective strategy for translation of personification in general and animal personification in particular. In doing so, a list of animals in Orwell's Animal Farm was made since the study of all animal personifications was not feasible. Then a comparison between the personifying characteristics of these animals in English and Persian was also made. The results showed that there are some differences between animal personification in English and Persian. This requires specific translation strategies which are proposed in the article.