TRANSLATION STUDIES
Year:2011 | Volume:9 | Issue:34|Papers Count:12

Qajar thinkers, in quest of the: reasons of Iran's backwardedness and innovative reformations, focused on the translation of western works in differing fields. Since the absence of law and legal structures was considered as the chief reason of Iran's backwardedness, a serious approach was developed towards legal works and law books of European countries. An investigation of the translated works in this field as well as the style of the translators may illustrate the effects of translations and their stylistic features on the concept of law and relevant institutions in Qajar society. The present paper examines the role of these translations and analyses their styles; it also focuses on the dominance of the writing style and its outcomes.

Translator of the holy Qur’an have a number of concerns. Amoung them, figures of speech are likely to play a major role. Taking this fact into account, the present study sets out to investigate one of the main categories of figures of speech, namely simile, in the Holy Qur’an and its five English translations by shakir (1985), Arberry (1955), Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1996), Pichtball (1996), and saffarzadeh (2001) to find out which patterns have been opted for in the translation of smile. To collect and analyze the data, the following steps were taken: first, a number of quranic similes and their equivalents in the five English translations were identified.Next, the English translations were analyzed in order to extract the patterns used by each translator in rendering the Arabic similes. Finally, the distribution of the translators’ preferred patterns was presented in separate tables for subsequent analysis and discussion. The researchers’ analysis revealed the translators’ concern for observing faithfulness to the extent possible.

Translation has always been a space for the encounter of “self” and “other”. Most of the French translation schoolars and philosophers such as jean-Rene Ladmiral, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinus and even Paul Ricoeur have concerned themselves with these two concepts. One of the Contemporary translation scholars who has based his translational approach upon these concepts Is Antonie Berman. The present paper deals with the significant features of these two concepts Within the frame of translation theories. Moreover, ir briefly reviews what berman has called “deformaing translation tendencies”. The concepts of Self and Other lead us to “untranslatability”. The last section of this paper studies Mounin and Du Bellay’s approaches.

The rapid expansion of translator training which is highly interrelated with the socio-cultural and economical developments in our country has underscored the need for efficient translation quality assessment (TQA). Unfortunately most of the works addressing TQA focus on the theoretical domain and the ones which have taken a practical stance to TQA mostly lack the necessary empirical robustness. The research reported here was conducted in order to address one Of the fundamental requirements in TQA at the undergraduate translator training program. It Involved development of scale for TQA based on a well-established theory of translation competence – the PACTE (2003) multi componential model. Three experienced raters used the developed scale for rating more than two hundred translation protocols written by graduate university students coming from three universities. Eventually the validity of the scal was established through calculation of different reliability estimates as well as running an exploratory factor analysis of the ratings.

The present paper favors a cognitive approach to metaphor launched by Lake off and Johnson’s influential book, Metaphors We Live By (1980) The aim of the study is to identify the aspects of similarities and differences of conceptual expressions between the source and target languages, and try to explore the translation strategies used by the translators based on the most outstanding translation hypothesis by Kvasses (2005). The corpus comprises two collections of documentary films which are nine bundred minutes altogether.The results obtained from the comparison of linguistic and cultural peculiarities of the metaphorical expressions between the two languages revealed that similarities in metaphorical expressions increase translatability, while differences binder the translation process. The analysis also showed that the translators tended to copy the original and reproduce in the TT the same image as given in ST. It seemed that tendency towards isomorphism is resulted from the translators’ poor knowledge concerning cognitive approach as related to conceptual metaphors.

Since in the proess of machine translation the source author is a human but the target translator is a machine, and up to now the human performance has been structurally more developed than that of the machines, sampling of human’s translation is more profitable for machine translation.This adberence makes the system ready to encounter the precise grammatical strategies of the source text efficiently. Empbasizing this conforming with human translation, the authors of this study try to scrutinize the performance of three systems of MT (Pars, Padide, and Google), translating English into Persian, to see to what extent they could observe this point.Systems tran.rlations are examined on the basis of Catford’s shifts and are then compared to corresponding human translations. Then a statistical analysis of' machines' performances in contrast to human performance is done; it is revealed that although Google's performance is much better than that of Pars and Padide, time systems stil need to be improved to efficiently cope with complicated structures.

The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between the attitudes of translators towards literature and the quality of their literary translations. To this end, 32 students majoring in English translation were selected as the participants of the study; an attitude questionnaire was devised and administered to estimate the attitudes of the translator trainees towards various aspects of literature; they were then asked to translate extracts of two short stories – Father and I’ and ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’. The translations were rated and the results were compared with their responses to the attitude questionnaire. It was revealed that there is indeed a significant positive correlation between translator trainees’ attitudes towards literature and the quality of their renderings of literary texts. Therefore, to promote a more fruitful instruction on literary translation, it is suggested that translation teachers to implant positive attitudes towards literature in translator trainees by applying effective methodology, selecting appropriate material and creating and amiable ambience where students can voice and rely on their personal interpretations of literary texts.

Contemporary Parisian literature, especially, on the eve of the Constitutional Movement (1905- 9) and afterwards, considers "satire" as a literary genre in which social and political injustice and flaws are underscored in a humorous language. This article, on the basis of Nida’s "principle of equivalent effect" (1966), asks if satire can transcend the geographical and cultural frontiers. The author maintains that, from a translational perspective, texts of satire may be divided into two main groups:.' Form-oriented' and 'meaning-oriented' - the former, usually containing figures of speech, bardly translatable. The discussion proceeds by presenting instances of satire in both English and Persian and the difficulties on the way of translators.