TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2011 | Volume:9 | Issue:33|Papers Count:11

Translation is one of the primary ways to cross the borders of one literature and enter “another’s” territory and it is a means to prevent the literature of a nation from retreating and consequently declining. The present study therefore attempts to show the role of translation in creating and directing the relations between literatures of different nations. It also tries to illustrate that translation has an outstanding position in comparative literature.To achieve this goal, first some functions of translation in literature (the effect of the text selected for translation on the target language literature, understanding the history of nations through the study of translated works, the effect of translation on the history of nations, and arousing the interest of target language recipients towards the literature of source language) are presented. Then, to show the mutual effect of Persian and Arabic literatures, the most prominent functions of translations from Pahlavi into Arabic are reviewed; these functions include: establishment of historiography in Arabic culture and literature, creation of fables with political themes, use of dialogue and debate in the structure of literary texts, expansion of narrative literature, etc.

Enamored with the ambition of providing a more nuanced picture of learners’ underlying potential and future-in-the-making, Vygotsky spearheaded an innovative assessment procedure more aptly known as Dynamic Assessment (henceforth DA) which serves simultaneously as an evaluative and instructional practice to diagnose learners’ specific areas of difficulties and to promote those which are in the state of ripening (Vygotsky, 1978; Poehner & Lantolf, 2005; Poehner, 2009). DA currently in vogue in developmental psychology is getting prolifically utilized by the interested scholars in adjacent disciplines (Lantolf, 2001; Poehner, 2005; Anton, 2008; Ableeva, 2008) with the goal in mind to revitalize the potential applications of Vygotsky’s Socio-cultural Theory (SCT) of mind and his revolutionary concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) for the assessment of learners’ linguistic abilities. This study, more evocative of Vygotsky’s SCT perspectiveon human’s mental functioning, was designed to test the feasibility of dynamic assessment as anassessment and instructional procedure to diagnose and promote the listening abilities of interpreting students in classroom context. Poehner’s (2009) recently introduced group-based (G-DA) and concurrent format of DA served as the theoretical basis for the construction of our assessment procedures. Concurrent and interactionist G-DA protocols were collected over a time span of eight weeks of instruction. Microgenetic and qualitative excerpts of G-DA protocols are provided to illustrate the effects of G-DA interactions on the students’ listening abilities. The results indicated that the G-DA instructions can better diagnose the students’ sources of difficulties at the time of listening to the news broadcasts and help promote those which are in the state of maturation. The G-DA interactions had the function of moving the entire class forward in its ZPD while co-constructing ZPDs with individual students within the social microcosm of the classroom context. Finally it is argued that the G-DA has the potential to serveas an innovative teaching and assessment procedure to enhance the students’ listening abilities in interpreting classes.

The present paper studies the impacts of colonialism on translation within the framework of post-colonial paradigm. To this end, two translations of Haji Baba of ispahan written by James Morrier, which were carried out during colonial and post-colonial periods, are compared with each other and with the original. This book is a sarcastic story about Iran and Iranian tenets and morale and was later considered a serious book and taught to British Army officers in India who were supposed to go to Iran on mission. The first translation belongs to Mirza Habib Esfahani who translated the book during the rule of Qajar dynasty-which is a period in the history of Iran known for the intervention of colonizing powers. The second translation is done by Mehdi Afshar and is translated after Islamic Revolution in 1979 which is considered the post-colonial period.In the comparison process, expansions and reductions were extracted, analyzed and categorized. Results reflected negative reaction of translators against colonization and colonizers which were more serious during the colonization period and a little subsided in the post-colonial period. It is worth mentioning that the reaction of translators was in line with their political orientation during their lives, according to their biographies.

Conducted within the comparative research model in translation studies, the present work is a descriptive-analytical corpus-based study addressing the translation of fronted themes, as the main category of marked structures, from English into Persian. The corpus built for the purpose of this study is a parallel one comprising 3500 English sentences appearing in two plays by Arthur Miller along with their Persian translations. Having studied all these sentences, a total of 745 marked (NCWO) items were spotted out of which 98 ones were instances of fronted themes. These were extracted along with their Persian counterparts and were further classified into three subcategories of fronted time/place adjuncts, fronted objects/complements, and fronted predicators. Comparative analyses of these items and their Persian renditions revealed that about 61% of all the fronted themes had been translated into marked Persian sentences while nearly 38% had unmarked renditions, and a negligible 1% had been left untranslated.However, the overall results by no means represent the ratio of marked translations-unmarked translations within this category of marked structures since there are drastic variations in the results pertaining to markedness correspondence in translation of different sub-categories of fronted themes. These sub-categories and their variations are discussed at length separately. The results and discussion spresented show how important it is to handle markedness phenomena carefully in translation and how the translators’ failure to do so can result in translations which are propositionally similar but communicatively different.

This study has investigated negation in Persian translations of the Holy Our’an. A typological study of negation in different languages illustrates that negative elements can generally be classified into two categories: standard negation used in negating basic sentences, and other negative elements like negative adverbs and negated adverbs. Languages use some or all types of negation devices. The study of negation in translations reveals the changes and developments in negation in Modern Persian. It also shows that in some translations negation has been presented as a free morpheme appearing in differing positions, from the right most part of a sentence to almost the left most part attaching as a prefix to the verb. This research also indicates that the base, to which the negative marker is attached, affects the selection of appropriate morphological form.The findings of this study suggest that translations of the Holy Our’an can be useful sources for translation studies in general and Persian translation studies in particular.

Originally a key term in biology where it referred to the off-spring of mixed origins, the concept of hybridity gained a new dimension with the rise of cultural studies. In relation to translation, the two major patterns of hybridity appear to be cultural and textual hybridity. To determine the elements of the former pattern, this research, in a meta-analysis study, revisited the concept in translation studies as well as cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies.The findings indicate that cultural hybridity appears to be ever marked by miscegenation (interracial, intercultural, or intersocial), oppression (political or cultural), immigration (real or virtua), contact (unidirectional or bidirectional), and assimilation (of the oppressed or the oppressive).

The practice of translation quality assessment is intimately tied to and framed by the theoretical assumptions and beliefs about quality translation and translation quality, regardless of whether they are explicitly articulated or tacitly fostered.Thinking through these theoretical quality assessment underpinnings can aid assessment researchers and practitioners to develop deeper understanding of translation quality and hence its assessment. While translation assessment literature abounds with traditional, narrow approach of forcing translation quality into artificially neat dichotomous or polytomous divisions, we tend to argue that this approach is unhelpful as it proved to be unable to engender a common shared platform of discourse among assessment theorists and practitioners, particularly when it comes to translation assessment in education. It also appears that the concept of translation quality has been confused for the construct of translation ability. Maintaining that quality impinges on quality performance which, itself, is underlied by the construct of translation ability, we argue that we need to turn the debate on and the quest for the hardly practically applicable polar divisions to more theoretical and empirical characterization of what quality generates from. As a step forward, we further suggest that translation researchers and testers address the relationship between translation competence and translation performance in the context of translation assessment research and practice.

Translation is a complex activity which requires competence in different aspects. Since translation involves linguistic competence, it is essential for translators to be aware of language differences. The purpose of this study is to identify and categorize the different strategies used by Persian translators in marked structures in the following works: The Old Man and the Sea, Animal Farm, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In doing so, the above English novels are selected as the literary source texts to be compared closely with their corresponding translated texts in Persian.Based on the results, most of fronted structures are translated into marked structures and most of cleft-structures are rendered into unmarked structures. The reasons underlying the differences of methods between two types of marked structures can be explained in terms of marked structures in Persian language. Since this research is about literary and written texts, it is proper to do it on the audiovisual texts like films and describe the translation of markedness in subtitling.

Regional expressions are potential problems in the translation process due to the fact that they have particular connotations and implications in the source language but not necessarily in the target language. Taking this fact into consideration, two English translations of Savushun, a Persian novel by Daneshvar, were selected. The regional expressions were first identified and categorized. Then, their English translations were identified and a comparison was made between the original and the translated texts in order to determine the translation strategies used. The results revealed that the most frequently employed strategy, i.e. ‘neutral translation’, cannot be considered the most effective one. There seem to be two main reasons for this. One reason is the translators’ unfamiliarity with the target language dialects and the other is the problems involved in the transcription of dialects, which may range from a lack of regional standards to refusal in the receiving community or creating unintended effects among the readers.It can then be concluded that translators should be either native in the target language to transfer the whole message of the source language or there should be a team of professionals as advisors. The findings are specially revealing for students of translation studies.