Research in Contemporary World Literature
Year:2011 | Volume:- | Issue:62|Papers Count:7

The encounter between the West and the East is historically regarded as crucial in the European chronicles. In the 16th century, the politics of Queen Elizabeth I towards Muslims was dualistic: on the one hand, her State united with Muslims to stand against imperial Spain, and on the other hand, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 by the English, her State’s policy changed into a negative representation of Islam. The primary objective of this paper is to explain the dualistic policy of Elizabethan England-a policy which was directed towards a union between the English and the Muslims to oppose Catholics and Spain. At the same time, Elizabethan authors extensively practiced the discourse of demonizing Muslims in their writings. As a final point, the researchers endeavour to explore the misrepresentation and exploitation of Muslims in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great Part I, II and Shakespeare’s Othello.

This paper examines the style of Saleh Hosseini as a literary translator in his persian translation of Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury in the light of Baker's universals of translation. First, the paper discusses why in the field of translation the translator's style seems to be less important than that of the original writer. The paradoxical issue is that if the writer's style is important, how is it possible for a translator to show his finger print in the translation? Secondly, the paper studies Hosseini's style in the light of the universals of translation proposed by Mona Baker, among others: explicitation, simplification, levelling out and normalization. Finally, the results show that Hosseni has got his own style and that normalization is his most frequent style in translation.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is commonly acknowledged as a leftist writer who locates his novels on the shadowy border between fact and fiction. Doctorow employs postmodernist techniques of narration to intermingle historical facts and imaginative fiction in ways that make them indistinguishable at times. On the outset it seems that his novels reflect a specifically leftist protestor who is extremely critical of the unjust system of governance of his country. Observing the novel as an instance of historigraphic metafiction, Doctorow's radical and subversive perspectives are considered in Ragtime; a novel set in the progressive era. The novel concentrates on the plights and struggles of America's minority stratum. Focusing on the fate of a Negro and a Jewish immigrant and their families, Doctorow studies the possibility of progress at a time when historians have generally termed as "general consensus." Although the tragic fate of Coalhouse Walker reflects the impossibility of change and Doctorow's harsh criticism of the unjustness of society, Tateh's incredible adjustment reflects an alternate perspective. It can thus be inferred that while Doctorow appears to be indicting his country's capitalist system, he is not necessarily expressing a completely subversive standpoint.

From the nineteenth century onwards, exactly at the time when paintings no longer relied on literature for their images, and their topics were not taken from literary sources, literature became highlyinspired by painting. Manette Salomon, a novel about a failed painter, is allocated to describe such an artistic environment. Manette Salomon is a character who appeares only in the second half of the book, and gives the plot a loving color with her presence. This charater doesn’t have any relationship with the primary purpose of the story which is reminiscent of the painting environment in the years between 1840 and 1860 in Paris. In this novel, painting is used as a significant pole in creating literature. What makes Manette Salomon a highly pleasant creature and fascinates Coriolis is that her body is not only a model for art that inspires the artist, but it is available as a masterpiece per se.

Translation of any type of technical and specialized texts inevitably faces with specific terminological challenges, most of which can be solved through documented searches or consulting the related experts. But legal translation deals with greater and more serious difficulties, because such kind of translations has legal consequences like a contractual relation which entails moral or financial commitments from both parties. Therefore, a translator of legal texts besides recognition of related words, expressions and phrases, must have enough legal information as well, because other than the mentioned legal consequences, defect and weakness in this regard make it much more difficult to understand the original text and naturally leads into a defective and unparallel translation. In this article first we present the works and ideas of contemporary theorists of legal translation including Edmond Cari Vujan Claud Jemar, then we study the challenges of legal translation including terminology and phrasing, ambiguity in legal texts, documentation and a multi-disciplinary approach. The case study is the translation of legal texts from French to English and Spanish.

The unfinished or very short Cook's Tale is an exception among the Canterbury Tales. This quality didn't make the author or later editors to dismiss it from the collection. Yet, it made the tale absent from almost all anthologies and caused it to suffer from the negligence of most critics and Chaucer scholars. However, both the narrator of the tale, who is a lower class Londoner living or working in the crowded city center, and the Tale, which deals with the corruption of lower class Londoners, can be significant from a realistic point of view. The Cook's Tale follows The Miller's and the Reeve's tales, and all three, intertextually linked, are fabliaux. This is in sharp contrast with the romantic and highly idealized Knight's Tale. This contrast is the first manifestation of realistic literature in the Canterbury Tales, and perhaps the whole of Chaucer's works. Indeed, it is this quality of Chaucer that makes the work his masterpiece.

In the present paper, syntactic omission convections in English are investigated on the basis of Dixon (2005) in translations from Persian for their being rendered explicit through translation. The data of the study entails Persian literary texts from different literary genres, namely fiction, poetry, and drama. The study is in line with that carried out by Olahan (2001) which explored syntactic omission conventions in the translated English corpora of BNC and TEC. The present research is an attempt to investigate the findings presented by Olahan yet across three literary genres and to inspect the behavior of optional syntactic explicitation pertaining to fiction, poetry, and drama translations. The results of the study revealed that explicitation of syntactic optional structures is a prevalent norm in modern Persian-English translations of literary texts and that among the proposed conventions, explicitation of the complementiser THAT followed by that of relative pronouns proves the most frequent in all literary genres; yet, in other sub-categories, our findings do not confirm Olahan’s. The findings reveal that explicitation is applied as a literary device in literary translation.