TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2010 | Volume:8 | Issue:29|Papers Count:17

This tripartite paper examines the translator’s presence in the translated narrative texts through shifts as proposed by Leuven-Zwart. In the first paper, the related literature was reviewed and through references to Catford and Viny and Darbelnette to Zwart, the concept of shifts was mentioned. Having compared and contrasted Don Quixote’s German translation, Zwart proposed 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 microstructure level. Having taken transeme as the smallest meaningful unit for comparative model, Zwart found 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 found a tetra relational shift: non-shift; modulation; modification and mutation. In the second paper, these shifts were analyzed through references to some translated literary text. Now in this last paper and based on Zwart’s descriptive model, it comes to fore that any shift in the micro-structure of narrative text would have effects on the macro-structure of the translated narrative texts.

The present study attempted to explore the manipulative aspects of translating for children, taking into account the linguistic and cultural differences between English and Persian, and to establish some common manipulative strategies used by translators. The study adopted a descriptive attitude toward the study of translation and the corpus was approached mainly from qualitative perspective with some elements of quantification. The categorization was mainly based on Dukate’s work on the typology of manipulation. Two well-known British children’s novels, i.e. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling and their translated Persian versions formed the corpus of the study. The results show that in translation of children's literature, whenever the given part of the text is not in conformity with the target language cultural, ideological and didactic considerations, it is omitted, substituted or attenuated in such a way as to conform to TL ideological and pedagogical values. However, even in cases where there were no cultural or ideological clashes between the source and target texts, the translators had tried to modify the source text so as to make it conform with the reading habits and linguistic expectations of target language readers.

As a result of the industrial revolution and the numerous advances in science as well as the inventions and innovations achieved by human beings, a good deal of new words and terms have appeared to identify the new concepts.The newly coined words usually share the same origin with the place of science production. The development and propagation of new science in societies and countries are coincident with the spread of new words. This is where the languages and cultures of the science-consuming societies-including our country-are affected by the language and culture of the societies that have produced those scientific concepts.If the language and culture enjoy required richness and preparedness and Follows a well-thought plan for embracing new science and dealing with the subsequent new words, the adverse influences can be reduced to the minimum possible level. The entry of Iran into the areas of nuclear industry and the transfer of nuclear science and technology is an obvious instance in this regard. The present paper looks at the necessity of adopting appropriate mechanisms For receiving and localizing science and relevant scientific and technical words; it then presents the solutions, suggestions and different viewpoints of the learned and the authorities in this regard.

This study was an attempt to investigate representation of gendered identities and gender relations through talk in both the English original and the Persian dubbed versions of a gender-sensitive movie named “The Hours”. Adopting Farahzad’s model of translation criticism and Fairclough s COA, the study-which was mainly descriptive and subiective - sought to answer two questions:“1. Does the dubbed version of a gender-sensitive English movie change the representation of gender identities and gender relations by manipulating the language, compared with the ones reflected in and by the original version?2. If yes, How?”Therefore, gender relations in both versions were examined according to the answers provided to ten questions raised by Fairclough at three levels of vocabulary, grammar and textual structure.

The case of grammatical gender is one of the important topics studied in the Russian morphology. Nouns are considered to have four different genders in Russian: masculine, feminine, neutral and common. Two of them, i.e. masculine and feminine (animate nouns), are closely related to natural or real gender. The gender of nouns determines that of their modifiers, such as adjectives, quantifiers, pronouns, etc.Taking a translational view, this paper attempts to categorize the grammatical gender of nouns in Russian based on the animate-inanimate category and compare them with their corresponding nouns in Persian. Since there is a great difference between these notions in Russian and Persian, and Iranian learners of Russian face problems in utilizing and translating such words, this paper surveys and suggests different methods of recognizing the natural gender of nouns and translating them into Persian.

Collocations, recurrent combinations of words whose co-occurrence probability is higher than chance, are frequent in natural languages. Since bilingual dictionaries do not offer proper equivalents for most of such collocations, the majority of machine translation systems perform poorly when faced with collocations, and as a result, their output quality decreases to a high degree. Monolingual corpora have recently been used in solving various linguistic problems including natural language processing, statistical machine translation, language teaching and the like.The present study describes the process of creating and exploiting a large monolingual corpus of Persian. This corpus enables us to solve the ambiguity problem of English collocations when translating into Persian with an English-Persian machine translation system. Using such a corpus as a target language corpus and an English-Persian bilingual dictionary, we study the efficiency of this corpus in finding the most appropriate Persian equivalents for English collocations in order to enhance the output quality of a machine translation system. The results of the experiment on a test corpus were very encouraging and achieved 90.83% success.

This study intends to provide some deeper insight into the notion of explicitation through studying text type which has not been fully studied in Persian as far as the researchers know. It holds Reiss' text type theory as a starting point to conduct a descriptive research. Explicitation as a cohesive device at levels of lexis and syntax is the focus of this study. Thus, the purpose is to observe the behaviour of explicitation at lexical and syntactic levels with regard to two types of text (informative and expressive), both qualitatively and quantitatively. In this study, three narrative and three scientific texts (translated from English into Persian) are taken as the corpus for expressive and informative text types. The findings clearly indicated that explicitation is text type dependent and expressive texts showed higher level of explicitness in comparison to informative texts.

Translation scholars are in the belief that when a hybrid text gets translated, its elements, whether hybrid or non-hybrid, undergo certain changes. The present study, thus, endeavours to probe into the nature of these changes. In other words, it attempts to illustrate what fates elements of a hybrid text are to encounter in the process of translation.Exploring an English hybrid text taken from immigrant literature along with its translation into Persian revealed that in the process of translation, some of the elements of the hybrid text remain intact and are transferred to the target text without any change; i.e. they preserve their original hybrid or non-hybrid quality. However, certain other elements undergo changes which we classified under the three categories of hybridization, dehybridization and rehybridization.

The main objective of this study was to find out whether English Present participles change in the process of translation into Persian. The material for the study was collected from the book, 'Animal Farm', written by George Orwell (1990) and its three translations into Persian. Based on the content or text analysis, the researcher could determine different grammatical structures in Persian for English present participles. of this storybook, 10 complex sentences containing present participles were selected from each chapter. These English structures were analyzed based on catford’s model (1965) of shifts in translation. Then, the frequencies and percentages were estimated and represented in figures I, 2 and 3. The grammatical structures in Persian were distributed such that Persian verb structures had the most (40%), and implications and phrases (3%) the least frequencies. The other grammatical structures such as clauses or adverbs obtained different levels of frequencies among the frequencies of the above mentioned structures. This paper provides other researchers an insight into translating these structures from English to Persian or other languages through analyzing the methods by which we can relate these structures to their translations; furthermore, the researcher can develop the methods for other grammatical structures.