TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2012 | Volume:10 | Issue:39|Papers Count:12

One of the most important issues in translation is the application of tools that facilitate this process. In this paper, efforts have been made to investigate the effects of application of mobile dictionaries on the performance of English news translators with a descriptive- experimental approach. This study is comprised of two separate phases. In the first phase of the project a questionnaire was given to 100 Iranian translators in five Iranian state universities to investigate the type of monolingual dictionaries they use while translating informative texts. In the main phase of the study, three groups of translators, each comprised of 5 translators, with different types of dictionaries- hardcover, computer software, and mobile dictionaries- were selected. They were given the task of translating three news texts from English to Persian, and their translations were assessed in terms of the accuracy of the words and expressions of the source text and the speed of the job. Results of the first phase of the study showed that most of the translators participated in this study use printed dictionaries. However, results of the second phase of the study showed that translators using mobile dictionaries rendered the texts more accurately and much faster than the other two groups. This study showed that mobile dictionaries can be suitable and easy tools for news translators.

This Cohesive devices have prominent role in the text because they provide surface evidence for the text unity and express the continuity that exists between one part of a linguistic form and the other. The present study aims at investigating cohesive devices in literary texts. In doing so, the third chapter is culled from the Gulistan of Sadi (one of the greatest Iranian poets) and is compared with its four English translation versions done by Edwin Arnold (1899), James Ross (1890), Edward Rehatsek (1964), and Backhouse Eastwick (1952). This study adopts the taxonomy of cohesive devices put forward by Halliday and Hassan (1976) to set up relationships within a text. They make a detailed classification of cohesion in English. The headings are reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion, which are investigated to determine whether there are any relationships between frequency of cohesive devices of the original text and its translation versions. To do so, the devices were first identified in the original text and then compared with each other in terms of number of occurrences in the translation versions. The results reveal that there are differences in the frequency of cohesive devices in the Persian (original) text and that of English translation versions. Each of these texts utilizes one of the devices more frequently which is indicative of the different nature of the two languages under investigation. These results can be used in translation teaching, translation criticism, and evaluation.

One Translation tools can make use of an interactive environment to solve translation errors before appearing the output. One of the most prominent of these tools is translation memories. They help the translator to automatically or interactively enter the intra or inter- text repetitive units in different levels into the target texts. In this paper a search method named "space- based reduction search" which uses using spaces between words is introduced. The main goal is to maximize the use of parallel corpus resources. We want to show that this search method can significantly enhance the chance of finding matches for various segments of input sentences; hence applicable in a Sub- Sentential Translation Memory (SSTM) system without running automatic alignment tools. This method has been tested on a small portion of English- Persian parallel corpus. The evaluations based on standards of recall and precision showed that the method Increases the parallel- finding chance of sub- sentential units to a high degree.

Iran and Armenia are two very close cultures from antiquity. There has always been much interaction between these two nations and Darius the Great has confirmed this issue on the Behistun inscription of 520 BC. The common history of Iran and Armenia dates back to 7000 years ago. Two countries share many religious, historical, cultural, political, and also linguistic elements. Both people were always interested in each other and as translation is one of the ways to convey information and knowledge between countries, they tried to introduce their culture, history, religion and also literature to each other through translation. Persian- Armenian and Armenian- Persian translation has a long history in both countries and by renewing the relations between Iran and Armenia after Islamic revolution in 1979, translation trend and the subjects selected for translation also changed. The goal of this historical study is to introduce Persian- Armenian and Armenian- Persian translation history in Iran and Armenia with a focus on translations after Islamic revolution in Iran.

Translation is to say something said or written in another language. The principal task of the translator is to render the source language propositions into the target language. The mere faithfulness, however, does not necessarily result in the establishment of rapport between the writer of the source text and the reader of the translation. Translators are also responsible to preserve the information structure in the target language. For Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), the information conveyed by a sentence is of two parts. One part is believed by the speaker to be shared with the addressee, the other part being totally new for him. The speaker, usually, does not reveal the new information, before the old information. The old information is referred to as "theme", and whatever said about it is referred to as "rheme". The relation between the theme and rheme comprises the information structure of the sentence. This article aims to compare the information structure in the English book "A Short History of Linguistics" and its Persian translation.

The universality of political discourse greatly relies on translation. However, potential problems are expected when it comes to the non- universal pragmatic meanings; problems which may result in misunderstanding or total breakdown in international communications. 'Implicature' is one such pragmatic meaning which is assumed to create problems particularly in political translation. The present article is an attempt to describe in what ways translators can cope more efficiently with problems raised in translation of implicatures in political interview. For this purpose, a political interview and its translation are taken into consideration. The results of the study show that in translation of political interviews the use of literal translation is more justifiable.

Undoubtedly, translation is one of the best tools for cultural exchange among nations, and the translator is a living agent in transferring words and ideas between the two languages and two cultures. If the translator translated the text with knowledge of the source and target language and awareness on the cultural conditions, it leads culture and literature of both languages from inactivity and isolation to the generation and active transaction. In other words, cultural, social and political conditionsaffect selection of works and method of translation. Edward FitzGerald's translations, the English poet and translator, from Persian into English, Rubaiyat Khayyam, Jami's Salaman and Absal and Attar's Bird Parliament, are well known examples. By applying domestication and foreignization in his translations, he attempted to adapt them with the Victorian mood and culture. Through reviewing Fitzgerald's translations from Persian into English, this article attempts to shed light on the reason why he applied the above mentioned strategies and expresswhy his works have been proved valuable after over one century, and even been part of English literature like Shakespeares'.

This study is intended to investigate the history of translation in the Iran of the time of Mughal invasions up to the collapse of the Timurids. Applying Holmes DTS model for researching the history of translation, this study covers 295 years of the history of Ilkhanid and Timurid dominance and focuses on identifying translators, translated texts and translation strategies. In this regards, the first and second hand historical resources related to these periods were studied. The results showed that the situation of Iran at these time periods paved the way for the resurgence of two movements, i.e. Persian Writing Movement and Turkish Yeni Movement. Furthermore, rulers and literary figures were involved as the powers and patrons of these periods. Finally, it is concluded that the periods under investigation can be marked as the second era of translation movement after the Abbasids.

A machine translation system using hybrid approach was presented in this paper. This hybrid system consists statistical and rule- based approach in serial. English words order was changed by rule- based parts of system, and then trained by statistical approach. Cross in alignment of statistical approach was reduced by change words order of source side, so on translation quality was improved. Synchronized tree adjoining grammars was used for change words order in source side. These grammars were extracted automatically from aligned parallel corpus. The system was tested by three types of test set and the results shows translation quality was improved by proposed machine translation.

Globalization, an obvious corollary of the changing face of the world, has been a central area of investigation in translation studies for quite some time. Many scholars have concerned themselves with this phenomenon and approached it from a variety of perspectives. This research is an attempt to group these scattered approaches together into a practical framework for the analysis of the translations of literary texts.Since this study is completely new, there is no pre- existing model for data classification. Therefore, the researchers took Davies's (2003) and Venuti's (1995) categorizations as the starting point in order to suggest a new and practical model for the analysis of literary texts. Simultaneously, the newly- introduced concept of 'glocalization' was highlighted in the suggested theoretical framework for the analysis of English- Persian literary texts.In the suggested model, an exhaustive taxonomy of translation strategies in the form of extreme- poles of translation strategies was studied. The space between two extreme- poles was also investigated by the effects the stated strategies produced in the translated texts. In other words, these strategies were ranked from 'near self' to 'near other' in order to illustrate precisely the glocalization phase.

The main aim of the present study was to develop a rubric against which interpreting can be assessed. To this end, different aspects of interpretation of four Iranian interpreters were analyzed. Based on the results obtained, a noticeable positive correlation was observed between the analytic scoring of interpreter performance on the one hand, and the holistic ratings provided by three experienced raters on the other. Analyzing the interpreters' performance over different time intervals, the researcher found a noticeable decline in the measure of complexity which was attributed to the heavy demand that restructuring imposes on the limited cognitive resources of the interpreters over time. Also, a significant negative rank- order correlation was observed between the complexity and translation accuracy of interpreter performance. This was justified on the basis of the trade- offs that interpreters were willing to accept in order to maintain the efficiency of their interpretation. The other findings of the study also corroborated the very idea of utilizing analytic measures for interpreter evaluation in order to increase objectivity.