TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2009 | Volume:6 | Issue:24|Papers Count:10

The first author of the present article has published another article entitled "the study of Terrier's theory in translation" in "Motarjem" journal. That article discusses the theoretical foundation of the theory claiming that firstly, the presence of a semantic field in one language does not imply its presence in the other one; secondly, semantic fields in languages do not coincide; thirdly, even if we accept that they coincide they are not covered with the same number of words. Considering that the translators of the holy texts translate them with ultimate caution, in this article we have tried to compare 33 English translations of Surah "AI-Nas" and their Persian equivalents to evaluate those claims.

Nowadays compounding is a source of many English neologism, so comprehension and translation of new compound words or phrases is a controversial issue in English language translation. The aim of this study was to provide answers to some teasing questions such as: the extent to which compound words are problematic for Persian translators of English, the causes of these problems, the strategies which were utilized and finally, proposing an effective model for translating the compound words. Thirty participants, both male and female, who were studying at semesters seven and eight of English translation at Islamic Azad University of Bondar Abbas were selected for this study. Sixty compound words from different newspapers, dictionaries and books were selected. Two elicitation instruments were also devised to measure comprehension and translation of compound words. Thus each subject was administered two tests of M/C and production formats. Not only aimed tests at assessing the variables such as: syntactic, semantic and cultural reference ambiguities that affected comprehension of compound, but also the strategies utilized by subjects to translate them were also taken into the consideration. Data were collected and the answer to each question was examined closely, both in terms of difficulty and underlying strategy. Findings suggested that comprehension of some compound words were problematic due to decontexualization, idiomatic and syntactic ambiguity.Results indicated that the subjects utilized figurative strategies in dealing with idiomaticity, which in turn supported "Direct Access Hypothesis" claiming: free translation is available in reaching idiomatic meaning. It means translators should not assume that primary meanings are transferred, but they should look at idiomatic meaning in both elements.

This article is an attempt to explore classroom translation activities within the task framework proposed by Nunan (1989, 2004). A (pedagogic) task is defined as having six components: goal, input, activity, teacher role, learner role, and setting. It is argued that classroom translation practice (CTP), a term used in this article to refer to any act of translation assigned by the teacher, comprises these six components and thus can be treated and taught like a task. The article comes to an end by raising the important question of how translation tasks can be sequenced as a topic for further investigation.

This bipartite paper examines the translator's presence in the translated narrative texts through shifts as proposed by Leuven-Zwart. First, the related literature is reviewed. Then, the concept of shifts is mentioned through references to Catford and Viny and Darbelnette to Zwart. Having compared and contrasted Don Quixote's German translation, Zwart proposes two models for the analysis of both SL and TL; namely, comparative and descriptive models. The former compares the items of SL and TL from micro-structure level. Having taken transeme as the smallest meaningful unit for comparative model, Zwart finds a common field between transemes of both SL and TL that she calls it architranseme. Having both transeme and architranseme of both SL and TL in the mind, she finds a tetra relational shift: non-shift; modulation; modification and mutation. In part two, these shifts are analyzed through references to some translated literary text; Golestan, to the Lighthouse, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, among others. It is probable, as a conclusion, that any shift in the micro- structure of narrative text would have effects on the macro-structure of the translated narrative texts of which it is mentioned in descriptive model upon which it is focused later.

The present paper attempts to provide a tentative model of translation criticism inspired by CDA. It is based on the idea that unlike translation quality assessment, translation criticism needs to deal with what a metatext does in the target society and what ideologies it represents. Based on the concept of intertextuality, it examines the metatext both as independent from, and in relation to its corresponding prototext at two levels: the microlevel which examines everything in the text, and the macrolevel which examines everything about the text.

This article is a contrastive study to investigate the transformation of language differences from source language to target language during the process of translation. The very first emphasis of the present article is to make clear the differences of cohesive tools (in this study, conjunctions) in the source language (the Arabic language of the Holy Qur' an) and the target language (the English translations of the Qur' an) and the explicitation of these tools in the translated texts. For this, the surah of Yusuf has been contrastively compared with its five English translations, i.e. translations of M.H. Shakir, Mohsin Khan, M. M. Pikthhal, Yusuf Ali. A. Qaribullah. The results show that the differences of cohesive tools in the source and target languages need a high amount of explicitation during the process of translation. Meanwhile, this study clarifies the two strategies which translators generally adopt for explicitation of the source text.

The book "In Search of Lost Time" is considered as one of the most important myths of the contemporary era and among the foundations of today's world literature. The characteristics of its writing style and the issues discussed in it are still objects for many researches from different aspects of linguistics. The findings of such researches have made the meanings between the lines of this book shine more vividly. The Persian reader who begins to read the Persian translation of this masterpiece, too, expects to reach the depth of the author's message beyond Persian words. This requires utilization of the findings of those linguistic researches.Here, the role of the translator is raised as the one who introduces the author. Her knowledge of the source language is a vehicle that guides her to the next step. The translator should be able to transfer the author's style and organization of writing. This is a very difficult task for the translator of Marcel Proust's great work. The structural differences between French and Persian on the one hand and Proust's unique style on the other hand make the translation task accompany with a lot of extra researches.But how should we put this book into Persian? What we intend to deal briefly in this article is first to study some features of writing in this ever-lasting work that include length of sentences, variety of verb tenses and moods, use of metaphors and the author's annotations. Then a method will be offered for their translation. The introduction of the characteristics of Proust' writing style can lead to a closer faithfulness to the author of the novel and clarifies the meanings that are hidden within sentences through structural analysis of the book.

The present paper, using a translational approach, tries to study the application of verbal forms of infinitives in Russian two-element simple sentences. In fact, it summarizes the ways such sentences are translated into Persian. Both infinitives and two-element simple sentences are widely used in Persian, but, unlike Russian infinitives, Persian infinitives have no verbal forms and play different roles, e.g. a noun, in the sentence. This paper aims at studying the ways of conveying the meanings of verbal forms of infinitives in Russian two-element simple sentences into Persian. The paper also analyzes the application of such verbal forms in Russian two-element simple sentences in view of their translation into Persian.