TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2012 | Volume:10 | Issue:38|Papers Count:13

Nowadays interpreting is one of the most important means of communicating between different communities. Interpreter should also do his/ her best to have a complete transmission of the message into the target language and the sender's intended effect on the receivers.When Translating, whether interpreting or translating, difficulties, based on their nature, can be divided into two broad categories called linguistic difficulties and cultural difficulties. The other feature, which can be applied to these categories, is the directionality of Translating. In this paper it was tried to analyze and study those linguistic and cultural difficulties which appear in simultaneous interpreting from Persian into English.

The present study aimed mainly to identify the dominant translation strategies used in the translation of colloquial expressions from English into Persian, to determine the orientation of Persian translations towards ST/ TT and to examine the formality levels of these translations. As a comparative descriptive research, this study compared and contrasted three Persian translations of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The theoretical framework for the study was based on McCrimmon's (1963) and Holmes' (1992) classification of English colloquial expressions and Sutton's (1965) category of Persian colloquial language. Furthermore, Newmark's (1988) and Baker's (1992) sets of translation strategies were used for determining the translation strategies in translating English colloquial expressions into Persian. Analysing the original novel, 1075 samples of English colloquial expressions were identified- based on the theoretical framework. The analysis of translations of these expressions indicated that the strategy of 'translation by a more neutral word' is the dominant strategy in all the three Persian translations, the orientation is towards TT and the major part of English colloquial expressions are translated with the higher level of formality.

One of the literary-cultural phenomena in Qajar Dynasty is the translation of non-Persian texts into Persian. The process dates back centuries before, however, by a close analysis of the movement during Qajar Period based on the resources we have, we can fully grasp its vastness. The first translations are from Abbas Mirza period. During the reign of Naser al-Din Shah, the focus of attention shifted to translation of non- Persian texts. Moreover, the growing awareness about the socio- cultural context of the country, development of relations with the West and personal support of the King made it a translation movement. The translated books show us the trends, i. e. the intellectual and cultural needs of the time. However, these factors changed during the reign of Mozaffar al-Din Shah. Hence, the socio- political tension as well as power struggles slowed down the translation movement. On the other hand, Iran- France cultural affairs, and the scholarships awarded to academics to study in France played an important role in the growth and dominance of the French language in Iran.

There is no doubt that explicitation is a frequent operation in translation. Under this view all kinds of explicitation would involve addition, and it would indeed be synonymous with addition. This paper will argue the nature of explicitation as a translation strategy and provides insights into the nature of the phenomenon. Also it aims to see how text- type focus informs the translator's decision- making in actual practice. To this end, a contrastive and exploratory analysis of operating instructions in English and Persian was conducted. For comparison the research is based on 20 operating instructions compiled from products and their translations. In order to maintain a certain balance, the sample texts included operating instructions belonging to different products (household appliances, electronic devices and others). This study focuses on texts relating mostly to consumer goods.

The present paper seeks to investigate the relationship between translation and the intellectual awakening and Constitutional Movement of Iran. To this aim, various historical books and articles were studied, and the views held by the great men of Qajar Iran concerning the relationship between translation and intellectual awakening as well as the contributions made by translated books, news, and plays to the cause of constitution- making were discussed in separate sections. The works were all produced in pre- constitutional Iran (from the establishment of the Qajar Dynasty in 1161 A.H. to the grant of the constitution in 1285 AH) and addressed socio- political issues. The results demonstrated that translation greatly served the cause of the Iranian constitutionalists in the studied era.

This paper deals with the problem of markedness in translation of English spoken texts into Persian. The data was collected by applying the principles of Grzegork's and Halliday'smodels to the popular series, Lost, and its Persian subtitled translation as the corpus. In this study a functional sentence perspective view was taken and clause was regarded as the unit of analysis. After identifying English marked thematic structures, they were compared with their Persian equivalents. The results demonstrated that constructions with a fronted time or place adjunct proved to be the least challenging while constructions with a fronted predicator showed to be the most challenging to Persian translators. Taking into account all types of marked constructions, it was observed that half of the English marked thematized constructions were translated as marked themes and the other half as unmarked themes. Four approaches in rendering English marked thematized constructions into Persian were found to be at work: translating as the same marked thematic structures, translating as equivalent but not necessarily identical marked thematic structures, translating as unmarked themes, and omission.

Markedness is one of the important issues in Universal Grammar. It is believed that marked verses / unmarked elements are acquired after the parameters were fixed in the frame work of Government and Binding theory. Markedness is of the factors differentiate languages. Because of this, it can be interesting for the translators, translation criticism as well as those who are interested in translation studies. Not observing markedness, the translators don't make ungrammatical structures. Because of this, the translators commit more mistakes.The study has investigated the amount of observed markedness in translating a particular structure in which Persian uses affirmative form but Arabic (the holy Quran] negative. It has been shown that up to %90 of the Persian translated form of the structures have been translated with no attention to the markedness structures of the items.The study has also shown that some unmarked structures have been paid more attention by the translators. It shows that markedness at least for some specific structures is not a matter of dichotomy.The study shows that in order to provide natural equivalence in translating the Holy Quran one needs to observe markedness particularly for those structures that seem different in SL and TL.

Google Translator Toolkit is one of the recent online translation tools made available to professional and non- professional users. This toolkit is an editing tool which enables users to edit the translations provided. by Google Translate. Google Translator Toolkit has several features which can make it interesting and at the same time useful for translators. First of all, it is rather easy to work. Second, its user- friendly interface allows users to easily edit the translations done by Google Translate, while at the same time provides access to existing translations done by other users. Last but not least, multiple users can work on a document and collaboratively translate it at the same time. The present paper elaborates on an observational study into the use of Google Translator Toolkit by a class of senior student translators at Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran in the context of translation of political texts from English into Persian. The results are drawn from the teacher's observation and the students' class discussions along with their answers to a questionnaire on the use of Google Translator Toolkit.

Translator's visibility has been a widely accepted concept in the field of Translation Studies. The purpose of this study was to see whether strategies contributing to translator's visibility, i.e. foreignization and neological translations on the textual level, use of footnotes, dedications and prefaces on the paratextual level were used by Persian translators of Silverstein's books. To find answers to the research questions, three poetry books by Silverstein named Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and Falling Up, and their two Persian translations by Hamid Khademi and Razi Khodadadi Hirmandi were analyzed.Both translators used the above said strategies, though to different degrees. They were visible in terms of foreignizing strategy with a slight difference of tendency in Where the Sidewalk Ends and Falling Up. Khademi (called Translator 2 in this Research) was found to overtake Hirmandi (referred to as Translator 1) in all the three books, with higher number of neological translations, use of paratextual elements such as footnotes, dedications, and bracketed information. The implications of using such strategies were seen to be of ideological nature, in a way that Translator 2's voice was heard louder and he exerted more power in raising himself to an authorial status.

Translation quality assessment is one of the key courses offered in translation studies in M.A. programs worldwide. To date, no study has addressed the effectiveness of this course from the perspective of the stakeholders. As suuch, this qualitative study aimed to evaluate the official curriculum and instructors' syllabi from the perspective of the students' experience. To this end, a questionnaire was developed and administered to 38 M.A. English translation students from three universities of Iran in order to solicit their experience of and feedback on the effectiveness of the official curriculum and instructors' syllabi of the course. The Results of the qualitative data analysis indicated that the curriculum did not correspond to the students' needs and expectations. Course syllabi, similarly, were at odds with their needs and expectations, and with the curriculum. A key concern neglected, interestingly, was translation quality assessment itself. This study suggests that both the curriculum and syllabi should be revised to give a more significant role to translation quality assessment models and approaches and to give a greater voice to the needs and expectations of the students, as key stakeholders, in curriculum and syllabus design of the course.

This paper aims to study the relations among Quranic words, the selection of different equivalents and the effect of selecting the variety of equivalents in transferring accurate message. It is obvious that two synonymous words cannot completely be replaced by each other in the translation process. Therefore, if different equivalents are used for a word in target language (TL), the TL readership may misinterpret the Quranic verses. Hence, we tried to study the stability in selecting equivalents as a criterion to assess the translation quality of two well- known translators of Quran- who translated it into English- named Arthur John Arberry and Abdullah Yusuf Ali, and evaluate the role of word repetition in the Quranic text. To achieve this goal, some words repeated in Quranic verses were chosen. Having chosen the words, we calculated the number of the word repetitions in Quran (frequency) word equivalents, and finally the percense of equivalent repetitions in Arberry's and Yusuf Ali's translations, using the Zekr Quranic software, and analyzed the data collected according to the most frequent equivalents used in translation afterwards. The results indicate that Arberry's performance is better than that of Yusuf Ali's as far as selection of the same equivalent is concerned.

Translation of the texts containing cultural elements especially slang and colloquial language are considered quite challenging for translators. In such texts the main authors depict symbols based on their own social and cultural norms. The translators become worried and confused when they face Impetuosity and rudeness of language by using slang and taboo expressions. Among others, translation of idiomatic expressions needs expertise, enough knowledge of target language culture and some special strategies as well. In this article the significance of the case examined on the two translated texts of a distinguished work of J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, with 28 years interval between the two translated texts. The main character narrates the whole story in slang language with deliberately and purposefully usage of idiomatic expressions and taboos. In the two translated texts, the number and the types of idioms and their translations based on the different known strategies were studied. Based on the evidences, the personality of the main character seems to be different for readers in two texts. The article comes to this conclusion that although both translations have been done carefully and are pleasant to the readers, the mentioned difference apparently comes from the domination of different cultural perspectives of Iranian public in the 40 and 70 decades, influenced on the two translators.