TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2011 | Volume:8 | Issue:32|Papers Count:18

This paper examines the problem of domisticated translation of Molana by Coleman Barks into American English. In the first place, the paper raises the question why Molana has been the bestseller in America and not in other countries like Iran; it is then argued that domistication is the most fundamental problem of Barks in translating Molana into American English which is due to his insufficient familiarity with Persian language and culture.To prove this, the paper closely compares and contrasts two translations of one of Molana’s sonnets by Nicholson and Barks and arrives at the conclusion that under the American hegemony and superiority, Barks has offered a very shattered, vague and secularized image of Molana, which befits the nostalgia of American readers and appeals to their taste: the American Rumi and not the Iranian Molana.

This paper attempts to illustrate that besides the practical impossibility of exact rendition of Sacred Texts, especially those belonging to a totally different cultural background, the exact translation of the Holy Our’an poses yet another difficulty, i.e. the speculative impossibility of rendering a Sacred Text that proclaims itself to be the Word of God. For this very reason, in some translations, it is explicitly stated in the introductory essay or highlighted in the title, that what is at hand is nothing but an interpretation or a reading of the original text.Moreover, the author has tried to shed light on some typical errors made by Muslims as well as non-Muslims, in their handling of Ouranic translations.A comprehensive bibliography of English Ouranic translations has been amended for those interested in this area of linguistic studies.

This paper passes under review the history of WordNets and introduces some of the most prominent projects of Word Net construction in order to illustrate how these tools can be employed as lexicon in finding equivalents in machine translation projects. Then the process of designing and developing the Persian noun WordNet-as a part of the Persian WordNet which is an important tool for processing Persian language-is discussed.At the end, the applications of Word Nets in general and more specifically their application in machine translation are put forward.

Constituents starting with phrases other than verbs are common in the Holy Our’an. Normally constituents like noun phrases, prepositional phrases and adverbs are fronted in Ouranic Arabic. And, since unmarked structures in Arabic start with verb, these types of structures are therefore marked and their initial element plays a Fundamental role in discourse. Non-verb initial constructions, due to their discourse functions, require a close attention to the discourse enterprise when being translated. Initial noun phrases can either be subject or object. Subjects are more problematic to translate than objects. Moreover, Persian, with its pro-drop nature and Freer word order in comparison to English, facilitates a more successful translation.

The present study addresses the role of translation training in handling English into Persian translation pitFalls by comparing the quality of translations carried out by non-trained and trained translators in terms of naturalness and closeness. Participants in the study included 15 English teachers who were competent in English but who had not received any translation training (Group 1) and 15 BA and MA students of English Translation (Group2). A translation test comprising 15 items which embedded a total of 20 translation traps was developed and the subjects were assigned to take it. Translations were collected and scored in terms of naturalness and closeness. The results obtained From the two groups were indicative of some interesting and meaningFul differences. The mean score of the subiects in group 2 (trained translators) turned out to be considerably higher than that of the subiects in group 1 (non-trained translators) implying the effect of training on the quality of translation. The coefficient of correlation between the subiects’ being trained or non-trained in translation and their scores on the translation test (worked out through applying the Point Biserial Correlation formula) turned out to be 0.86 indicating the Significance of the correlation. Furthermore, an item-to-item analysis of the renderings was carried out which proved that trained translators outperformed non-trained ones in rendering all the items (to a varying degree depending on the nature of the item in hand).

The present paper sets out to introduce a model of explicitation in literary translation. The paper opens with a brief review of the notion of explicitation and the way it has been treated in translation taking a lexical approach. Further, our proposed model will be brought forward which will encompass eleven categories of addition to the text where such additions are recoverable from the context and hence believed to pertain to explicitation. The model primarily aims at providing more details than the criteria used for distinguishing explicitation in most research in this area.The examples of explicitation presented for each category are taken from English translations of modern Persian literary texts in the study. The paper may shed light on explicitation as a tendency observed in translations and its different types of occurrence and can be used in translation training courses. Moreover, the model may well serve as a means to enhance self-awareness in translators helping researchers in psycholinguistic-oriented approaches to the study of translation.

Ear-voice span (EVS) being vulnerable to such variables as language combination (Lee, 2006), Speaker’s delivery rate (Lyda, 2007, Wei, 2002), speech propositional density (Gile, 2008), etc. during the process of simultaneous interpreting (51) has been envisaged as a reliable measure of interpretation quality since the early discoveries in interpretation research (Gerver, 1976; Barik, 1973). This study aims at measuring the EVS patterns adopted during 51 in Persian/English language pair and assessing their effects on the quality of interpretations. In an experimental procedure, we compared the EVS patterns of two groups of 10 advanced trainees, one group interpreting from Persian into English and the other from English into Persian. With the aid of Sound Forge, a comparative analysis was made on synchronized SL-TL wave files to detect different EVS patterns adopted by the subjects. The quality assessment of interpretations demonstrated that the asymmetrical word order between the two languages highly influenced the subjects' online EVS choices leading them to select longer patterns during Persian-English51and, subsequently, more faulty interpretations.

The purpose of this research was to compare the lexemes used in books for children aged 7 to 12 and the basic vocabulary for the same age groups.To this end, a comparable monolingual corpus of Persian translational and non-translational children’s literature was used from Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB).This corpus was compared with the list of Iranian Primary School Students Core Vocabulary. Results indicated that there was no acceptable conformity between the lexemes used in translational and non-translational texts prepared for children aged 7 to 12 and the basic vocabulary for the same ages. From the findings of this study, it can be assumed that in writing and translating books for children, the list of Iranian Primary School Students’ Core Vocabulary may be a reliable source; though other supplementary elements are also required.

This research was an attempt to discover the most frequent shifts in English translations of the Our’an using Vinay and Darbelnet’s framework. The corpus of the study consisted of five English translations of the Our' an {those of Shakir, Ghali, Yusuf Ali, Arberry and Pickthall} prepared to be analyzed manually to discover the shifts. The researchers found that in order for the translations of the Our' an to be exact and faithful equivalents to the Original, shifts are indispensable. Shifts take different forms: structural, cultural, stylistic and semantic. This study revealed that the most frequently occurring shifts are structural and semantic ones. The frequency of shifts in each sub-corpus as well as their frequencies in the entire corpusare measured and discussed.