TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2005 | Volume:2 | Issue:7-8|Papers Count:10

What normally comes to mind as translation proper is the interlingual translation, i.e. transferring a meaning or message out of the "form" of a language into the "form" of another. Translation, whether intralingual or interlingual, has had and will have an important role in expressing thoughts and developing human sciences. Intralingul a translation, i.e. to put a meaning in other words in the same language, is important in developing the thoughts within a single society; and interlingual translation is valuable for expanding communications and developing sciences and technologies between nations throughout the world. A review of the history of translation development shows that translation in its customary meaning has played a very significant role in transferring sciences and technologies and expansion and development of human knowledge and culture. This article intends to elaborate on the role of translation in the development of humanities. For this reason, while discussing the nature of translation from different perspectives, it deals with the evolution of translation throughout history in view of its impact on the flourishing of human sciences.

Anticipation as an on-line strategy in SI is conceived as rendering a constituent in the output language by the simultaneous interpreter before receiving its original counterpart in the input language. A potpourri of intriguing cues, though piecemeal is normally taken as a backdrop by the interpreter to hypothesize on the speakers unfinished utterances. The present paper takes its point of departure from the basic assumption that anticipation is regarded as inevitable in SI process particularly in the case of two structurally asymmetrical language-pairs. With this in mind, we will following an introduction, present an overview of the how and why of the different types of knowledge at the interpreters disposal at the time of anticipating during SI and then proceed with multiple examples taken from different live corpus to justify the mainstream position. Finally, on implication side, the paper will offer some tips on how to foster the said strategy for making an appropriate anticipation.

The translator of literature, in general, and fictional works, in particular, has to do a stylistic analysis at both macro/micro levels in order to achieve some higher levels of "stylistic adequacy". The macro stylistic analysis involves discovering the "how" (or "quality") of a work while in micro stylistic analysis the translator/analyst is required to explore into "why" the text possesses that quality. The macro analysis is typically accomplished through investigation into the "surface" layer of the work and leads to a general view of the overall stylistic strategy (or strategies) resulting in the so-called "ideational" metafunction of language; but the micro analysis drives the translator/analyst to reflect upon the "inner" components of the work as well as having an eye on the surface parts. Being involved in such a two stage analysis, the translator, on one the hand, treats the text as a "product" and tries to capture the stylistic features leading to the aesthetic function of language, generally through some mechanistic procedures of "text analysis", and on the other hand, s/he faces the fictional work as a "process" and tries to pay attention to the "production", "reception", and "understanding" steps of textual interaction as well as to study the "impacts" of the text on readers mostly through the common methods of "discourse" analysis, "text interpretation", and "intertextual analysis". Thus, s/he identifies the actual concrete realizations of the writers macro stylistic strategy (strategies) resulting in the so-called "textual metafunction" of language. What is finally resulted from such a macro/micro analysis determines the "operational strategies" employed by the translator in his/her way to select "functional choices" which are of similar stylistic values in the target text.

This paper is an attempt to clarify the aims of MT and highlight some of the reasons why Persian MT is now a matter of necessity for Iranians in terms of its scientific, philosophical, social, and commercial benefits. After giving a short history of MT, I will illustrate that translation quality is not all that matters in the 21st century. I will show that there are some other factors involved that make MT an attraction for translators and non-translators the same. I will briefly review a few types of MT systems. From the rule-based approaches, transformer and linguistic knowledge (LK) architectures, and from the empirical approaches, example-based and statistical architectures are reviewed to give the reader an idea about how MT engines work. Linguistic and/or computational problems of each approach are discussed in short. It is argued that MT systems are better to use a combination of various architectures rather than sticking to a single approach. As an example of such architectures, Bond’s (2002) proposal for a Multi-Pass Machine Translation (MPMT) is reviewed. Wherever possible, technicality is avoided and references are made to the Persian language so that the material is more attractive and tangible for non-MT practitioners.

Communication in a bilingual or even a multilingual context may in certain circumstances necessitate the assistance of a mediator. That is to say, in the absence of the mediator there is a strong possibility that communication will be distorted. The objective of this paper is to describe the performance of the mediator as well as evaluating his/ her conduct in the hope that this will pave the way for the establishment of certain criteria based on which one could assess his/her translational competence and performance.

The aim of this article is to investigate three different models of presenting and teaching sentence structure and their effects on more beneficial comprehension of translation unit. Although sentence is, perhaps, claimed to be the best unit of translation, observations and experiences have indicated that translation trainees sometimes encounter serious problems in rendering units of translation from or to different languages. Thus, the question this study tried to answer was whether there were a relationship between the type of sentence structure model and the trainees" better performance on a test of translation. To answer this question, 45 Iranian students of Translator-Training Programme were selected and randomly assigned to three groups. After a treatment with three different models of sentence structure, the students were tested on translation. The data were analysed using a one-way ANOVA, and it was concluded that difference in the model of teaching affects student’s better performance on translation.

Rapid development of translation industry in the world today reveals the growing need for translation tools. This article tries to briefly study various translation tools. These tools are considered as very helpful devices in the translation process. The most important tools involved are translation memory, machine-readable dictionaries and machine translation software. Using modern technology in translation not only accelerates the translation process itself but also augments its consistency and efficiency.

Translation is an activity of enormous importance in modern world and it is a subject of interest not only to translation scholars, linguists, professional and amateur translators and language teachers but also to electronic engineers and mathematicians. Translation may be defined as the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL). The central problem of translation practice is that of finding TL translation equivalents. The present paper elaborates on the nature of translation equivalence and its components from different perspectives in the hope of making translators cognizant of the deliberate task they carry out in the process of translation.

The present paper deals with the concept of meaning in translation. It first challenges the validity of the dominant reductionist techniques of meaning analysis, i.e. componential and propositional analysis, and then studies the concept of meaning in terms of the static and dynamic parts of meaning. It assumes that all the target language versions of a given source text share the static part of meaning to some extent, but differ in their interpretations of the source text and are open to further interpretations in the target language. The paper further concludes that this fact justifies the plurality and diversity of target language versions.