TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2009 | Volume:7 | Issue:27|Papers Count:9

This paper is an attempt to investigate the application of Grice's conversational imprimaturs in the stories of prophets Joseph and Moses in the Holy Qur'an and their translation into Persian and English. To do so, the authors compared and contrasted the conversational imprimaturs in the stories of prophets Joseph and Moses in the Holy Qur'an and its four English and four Persian translations. First, the conversational imprimaturs and their related conversational maxims, i.e. quality, quantity, relation, and manner principles, were analyzed and explained in the target verses. Secondly, the mechanisms and strategies of translating the related maxims and Cis in the analyzed verses were investigated. Since conversational implicatures are stated implicitlyin the conversations of the Quranic stories, the translators had to explicate the implicit meanings of these conversational imprimaturs by making use of exploitation strategies. The investigated exploitation strategies in this paper are footnote, parenthesis, bracket, and application of no strategy.

The present essay summarizes the research intending to suggest that prose translation of poetry should be practiced as a last resort. The whole discussion centers on the translatability of classical English poetry to Persian poetry and whether an equivalent poetic form could be used for this purpose. In order to reduce the predicted additions to the original content a strategy is proposed which is rooted in stylistic, scientific, and hermeneutic studies on the original poem. Accordingly, a sample classical English poem by John Milton is translated into Persian both by poets and through the proposed strategy. The poetic translation which has an eye on the characteristic features of the original poem is believed to be the outcome of a close cooperation between the translator and an expert in Persian prosody. The research takes on an eclectic approach in its evaluation of the translations and is for the most part poet-oriented.

With the advent of the Internet, a new type of corpora namely disposable corpora found their way into translation. A disposable corpus is a small collection of Internet documents created ad hoc as a response to a specific text to be translated. Such corpora are usually made when the information translators need to comprehend the source text or produce the target text are beyond what dictionaries have to offer. Disposable corpora which can be either target monolingual or comparable bilingual are compiled to answer a specific question and as a result, they are usually abandoned after the need has been met. Since such corpora are easy to build, they can be used as a substitute to large corpora which are usually difficult to access. In the context of Iran with few large corpora of Persian language available to translators, disposable corpora can well be used by translators as a new source of information and by translation teachers as a new teaching tool in their classes.

Hybridity, as an obvious corollary of the changing face of the world, has been a central area of investigation in translation studies for quite some time. Many scholars have concerned themselves with this phenomenon and have approached it from a variety of perspectives. The present research has classified these scattered approaches to hybridity along four main trends. Furthermore, merely a few of these scholars have explicitly and directly addressed the manifestations of hybridness and those few have contented themselves with sings of hybridity solely in the light of a single perspective, overlooking other approaches. Therefore, an exhaustive taxonomy of elements which render a text hybrid is missing from the literature on hybridity and this is what the present paper has attempted to develop.

The present article is an attempt to investigate the nature of translation criticism through offering a content analysis of the researchers' attitudes in the world of the translation criticism. The linguists, translatologists, and translators' views have been investigated from descriptive, comparative, analytical, and critical points of view. All researchers in the survey hold that translation criticism is basically a research oriented phenomenon and will have different consequences for translation education system from different perspectives. Since translation itself is an interdisciplinary field, there are different variables and different sorts of the relationships between the variables influencing the process of translation. Therefore, this phenomenon should not be taken for granted in the process of material development, translation education and evaluation. Since, in relevant fields such as linguistics, semiotics, socio-cultural studies, and language education a large number of scientific investigations have been carried out, their foundations can be analyzed, classified, and finally applied creatively and innovatively in order to establish a well-organized, scientific, and educational systemfor translation.

This article takes textuality as a promising approach toward the study of explicitation as a feature of translation product and process. Thus, it examines the textual instances of explicitation extracted from "Introductory" and two chapters of Sa' di's Gulistan translated by Edward Rehatsek (1964) in terms of features of textuality. In this study, Klaudy's (1998) categorization of explicitation and Neubert and Shreve's (1992) model of textuality are used as the theoretical frameworks for explicitation and features of textuality, respectively. Data analysis shows that all types of explicitation involve a shift in the direction of conformity with features of textuality in the target language. In other words, the translator has reconfigured the patterns of intentionality, acceptability, situationality, informatively, coherence, cohesion and intertextuality to put the original text in the communicative matrix of the target language. As the translator's communicative behavior is regular and norm-governed and the translatoris a professional one, exploitation in this study can be said to be a professional norm of communication and features of textuality are the conditions under which this norm is operating.

The term 'transition' is a new label coined by the researcher to better reveals the translation processes at work by a majority of Iranian EFL learners involved in translation activities. 'Transition' stands for 'translation-composition', an exercise mainly applied by less-proficient translators, where the product - the translated material - is partially based on the source language but largely on the translator's idiosyncratic version of what the story is likely about. One criterion to judge the value of a translated work is to read it without comparison with the original to find out whether it makes sense as far as the target language is concerned. My experience as a teacher of translation courses at different universities has shown that a good number of English-Persian translator trainees make up their own stories such that the target passage, if not compared with the source, seems to be totally acceptable.The study reported here involved 62 Iranian EFL university students taking an advanced translation course. Their translation assignments revealed a good deal of 'transition', and quantitative as well as qualitative analyses were carried out in an attempt to find out why such 'transitions' were opted for. The paper discusses further results as well as the implications for translation pedagogy.  

The objective of the present study was to probe into the under-researched issue of gender and translation and to explore any possible relation between the two. The purpose was achieved through an experimental research. A translation protocol, consisting of wanly four metaphors contextualized in sentences and/or brief paragraphs were translated by.32 female and 23 male MA students. The subjects were selected from among 63 MA students of English translation through a homogenizing TOEFL test which used an adapted version of IBT. The following results were obtained: in translating metaphors, first, the types of strategies used by both male and female translators fof/owed exactly the same order of frequency; second, the male subjects, compared to the female subjects, made more use of the strategies: a) keeping the metaphors (i.e. retaining the form of the metaphors), b) using equivalent TL metaphors and c) omission of the metaphors; But the female subjects showed greater tendency towards: d) explaining the meaning of the metaphors and keeping them at the same time, e) translating the meaning of the metaphors without keeping the metaphorical imagery and f) using similes.

Translation process has been one of the concerns of translation studies over the past three decades. In line with this tendency, translation strategies have been studied by several researchers. However, the results were either so broad or so narrow that one could hardly find their pedagogical implications. This has resulted from either the specific purposes or the restricted scopes of those studies. Based on think-aloud protocols obtained from novice translators, this study offer a pedagogically oriented taxonomy of translation strategies which may be considered as cornerstone of prospective studies. The main categories of the identified translation strategies are cognitive, meta-cognitive, social and affective strategies which are fully discussed and exemplified in this paper.