TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2011 | Volume:9 | Issue:35|Papers Count:14

The present paper, written within van Dijk's social-cognitive approach (van Dijk 1988, 1995, 1998a, 1998b), attempts to investigate certain ideological aspects of news headlining in an English-Persian translation context. Some news headlines translated into Persian have been chosen through a self-selection process in order to be compared with their English originals. The analysis of sample data suggests that the polarization of Self versus Other is generally influenced by translators' /target news producers' (dis) approval of the ideological content of the source headlines in question, and is realized through maintaining, manipulating or excluding original headlines in the target news stories. These translation strategies are typically served through the purposeful application of linguistic expressions (both at lexical and grammatical levels) or non-linguistic elements (such as images, photos and graphic drawings).

This research was conducted in order to determine whether there was a relationship between Iranian translation students' translation quality and their level of imagination. To this end, a production test of translation (a nontechnical text of around200 words selected from a sample TOEFL reading section) and a standardized imagination questionnaire (translated into Farsi for easier comprehension) were administered to310 students of English translation at Islamic Azad University, Tehran Central Branch. Out of this total, 205 completed both tests and were thus included in this study: 145 BA students and 60 MA students. The study followed an ex post facto design with no treatment. The subsequent data analysis following the administration of both tests showed a significant correlation between the participants' translation quality and their level of imagination; furthermore, a linear regression analysis revealed that imagination was a significant predictor of Iranian translation students' translation ability.

Information structure theory as one of the latest developments in linguistics can have implications for translation. The distribution of old and new information in a given discourse can affect linguistic coding in morphological, syntactic and phonological areas. This study pursues three goals; first, a principle under the title of "Preservation of Information Unmarkedness" is introduced which is a vital factor in linguistic coding of mental referents and propositions. Second, the effects of this principle on linguistic coding at morphological, phonological and syntactic areas are analyzed contrastively in English and Persian. Third, some of the implications of this contrastive study for translation are presented.The findings of the study revealed that the said principle in both languages affects the linguistic coding in all areas of syntax, morphology and phonology, but in different ways. The results also imply that translators should be more careful in replacing the morphological forms of source language, and more relaxed in translation of syntactic structures and prosodic patterns of SL. In other words, in these two latter areas (syntax and prosody), a literal translation has a higher chance of success than in morphology.

Translation studies as an Interdisciplinary approach has brought together many disciplines such as psychology, literature, philosophy and more recently cultural studies besides many other fields. Apart from the growth each of these fields has brought to translation theories, the expansion of cultural studies and especially post-colonialism into the field has made the borderline between cultural studies and translation studies fuzzier. As a result of this and following the cultural turn in translation studies, micro-Level considerations have given way to macro-level ones, viewing translation in the larger context of culture as a whole. This study, having the same concerns, aims at exploring textual and cultural bybridity in the English translation of The Blind Owl translated in the migration setting.

Shift of addressee is one of the main issues in the Qur'an which has not yet been properly investigated; its determining function, as a result, needs focus and attention. While expounding on the concept itself within the Revelation, this paper has attempted to examine the problems of some English and Persian renderings of the Qur'an with respect to the shift of addressee and has then tried to offer some solutions to them. The results obtained indicate that the translators clearly lacked proper knowledge of the concept of shift of addressee and the oral language of the Qur'an. In brief, a total number of 2181 verses with vocative architecture were found in the Qur'an among which 62 verses involved shift of addressee, and were analyzed under four categories of context-based, stylistic, strategic and language-based.

The current study was designed to investigate how identity. reflecting items have been translated from Persian into English. To identify identity-reflecting items, Spivak's model of language and Thriveni's taxonomy of cultural items had been used. Moreover, Chesterman's taxonomy of translation strategies was applied to enable the researcher to compare source text with the translated text. Three categories of identity-reflecting items were identified; namely, rhetorical items, cultural items, and silenced items. All of these items were first traced in the Persian texts and then compared with their respective translations. Upon analysis of the data, it became apparent that for each category certain translation strategies were used and strategies appeared to overlap to some extent.

Translation evaluation is a delicate process which plays a pivotal role in translator training; it is a means by which translation education can fulfil its objectives. The importance of evaluation has led to many studies and researches during the last decades and various models have been presented for translation assessment. The reason behind the shift from one model to The next seems to be the quest for greater objectivity.This paper seeks to illustrate to what extent this objectivity is realized in different models of assessment. Besides, these models are appraised based on five criteria of an acceptable evaluation; at the end, a new eclectic model is proposed.

One of the most challenging and difficult aspects of translation is related to the translation of idioms by both machine systems and human translators. The problem arises from the recognition of the idioms on the one hand and translating them on the other hand. idiom recognition is not easy since an idiom may change its form based on the context in which it is used. Using systematic idiom collections and special rules to recognize idioms, the problem can be solved to a great extent. Moreover, the inclusion of a morphological as well as syntactic parser can greatly enhance the idiom recognition and translation process. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we want to test Google Translate to see how well it is capable of translating idioms and next to provide means to improve the quality of translation of idioms by Google Translate.

This article presents a comparison of translators' strategies in translating the figurative language of the Qur'an. In recent years, some research has been done on Qur'an translation, but little attention has been given to the methods of translating figurative language of this Holy Book. To this end, all the similes of the Qur'an were selected as samples for research and the changes of similes during the transference into Persian and English translations were examined.The statistical test of Chi Square was used to show the significance of translation differences in transferring similes' components. The results revealed that some changes occur in the process of transferring simile components, but there is no significant relationship between partial point of similarity and explicitation strategy in Qur'an translation.

This research is a contrastive analysis and comparative study of four English translations of some poems of Hafiz in order to find the frequency of lexical expansion, reduction, and correspondence in the translations. The theoretical framework is lexical expansion and reduction proposed by Nida and Taber (1969), but the researcher has also added «lexical correspondence», as the third strategy, to those two. In analyzing the English translations, the researcher investigated the corpus to see which one of the three strategies is most frequently and which one is least frequently used in the translations.The result shows that lexical expansion is the most frequently used strategy, and lexical reduction is the least frequently used one in the translations studied. The reasons for this result are: firstly, definite and indefinite articles as well as various prepositions are widely used in the English language; secondly, Persian poetry is highly condensed and compact from semantic point of view; therefore, when it is translated into English, it will be in need of being expanded and explained; thirdly, most of the translators are usually inclined to have their translations explicit, free of any ambiguity, and intelligible for the readers.

Verb-initial constructions do not have the same information structure as noun-initial structures in Traditional Arabic - the language of the Qur'an. Translating Arabic noun-initial verbal constructions which are marked, into other languages like Persian and English, which in their unmarked order place subject in the initial position, requires thorough investigation. Initial nouns in verbal constructions playa specific part in discourse, and hence are pragmatically different from VSO structures in Arabic. Consequently, when translating these constructions we need to take great care of their syntactic structure. Persian, in comparison to English, because of its more flexible word order, provides more freedom in incorporating extralinguistic factors.

This paper examines the relationship between gender of the translator and the extent to which his/her ideology is reflected in his/her translation. The study uses a descriptive methodology with an ex-post facto design and analyses the data within the framework of critical discourse analysis as applied to translation by Farahzad. The 24 subjects participating in this study were selected through purposive sampling and with an equal number in both genders. They were given certain texts to translate and their translations were analysed within CDA framework. The results showed that both male and female participants had reflected their ideology in their translations, while this proved to have a greater frequency in male translations. Moreover, since all the participants were Iranian, compliments, which is a known Iranian cultural element, were also studied; for this purpose, the participants were asked to translate a particularly selected text from Persian into English; the analysis of their translations revealed that both male and female translators reflect compliments in their translations, but this time, it had a higher frequency in female translations.

In the present paper two different Persian translations of Jibran K. Jibran's The Prophet are objectively assessed using Argumentative Approach. Then, the efficiency of the approach in identifying, comparing and contrasting the drawbacks and strengths of the two translations is examined. The findings revealed that the Argumentative Approach was not able to identify the obvious stylistic differences between the two literary translations studied, as were identified by Vinay and Darbelnet's model. Finally, the researchers suggested some modifications for this approach in order to improve its efficiency.

The present research intends to examine translations in Iranian children's magazines published between 2004 and 2008 and offers some suggestions for the qualitative improvement of translations in such magazines. The paper also aims at identifying the areas which are ignored in children's magazines; these purposes are fulfilled using content analysis of the corpus of the study; six translation-related questions are posed and the paper has attempted to provide answers to these questions through the analysis of the corpus.In the end, based on the obtained results, some suggestions are made for the qualitative improvement of translations in these magazines.