Journal of Language and Translation Studies
Year:2011 | Volume:42 | Issue:3|Papers Count:9

The divisibility of general foreign language ability and language skills has been a long-running question in applied linguistics. Formerly researchers believed that language skills are global but more recent views consider them as divisible. However, there is no consensus among researchers on the number and nature of the underlying components of language skills. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the divisibility of foreign language comprehension construct. To this end, an English comprehension test comprising two skills of listening and reading was analyzed with a multidimensional IRT model. Three competing models with one, two and four dimensions were fitted to the data. Findings showed that the four dimensional model fits the data best. The implications of the study for foreign language testing and teaching are discussed.

The present paper attemts to criticize the ESP courses at Iranain universities providing some solutions to the problems. To this end, 600 university students were asked to take a questionnaire on ESP and 20 professors were interviewed. Moreover, the excersises of the ESP books were analyzed in the light of perceptual learning styles. The results demonstrate that both learners and professors are not satisfied with the books, and there is a wide gap between learning style and the styles provided by the books. In the end, some suggestions were made to enhance the quality of learning English at universities.

Descriptive Translation Studies has opened bright perspectives to translation studies researchers. Translation norm is one of the fundamental notions in DTS. Despite the norm-based essence of the translation action, few studies have ever been conducted to investigate the norms governing the translation of English novels into Persian. This research aims at investigating the impact of modern English novels translation on the sentence-length stylistic norm in Persian novels. In this regard, three classic Persian novels, three modern Persian novels and three English novels were investigated. Based on the obtained results, the translators’ inclination to sentence-level translation and the higher sentence length average of English novels has led to the transference of long sentences into TTs. In spite of that, the translation of English novels has not considerably influenced the sentence-length stylistic norm in Persian novels. In other words, sentence-length stylistic norm in Persian translations is, to a large extent, different from sentence-length stylistic norm in contemporary Persian novels. Based on the obtained results, the translators’ personal styles and English novels sentence-length are the main factors contributing to the sentence-length stylistic norm in Persian translations. As a concluding remark, description of translation norms governing the translators’ action requires the investigation of the translator’s habitus, translation mechanisms and target culture’s needs.

Emile Zola, who founded naturalism in the 19th century in France, is an author who has profoundly reflected on social pains beyond his writing style and, in his works, has portrayed an intact collection of the main behaviors reflecting his own social and cultural milieu. His works are very important from the perspective of literary, social and political dimensions in the world literature. The translation of many of his books in Iran has brought about developments too. In this article, the researchers have investigated Zola’s standing and influence on the process of Iranian fiction writing.

This paper intends to offer a comparative, descriptive, and analytical investigation of the interaction between culture, language, and translation through the analysis of translatologists, linguists, and translators' approaches. The results of the study reveal that 67.44% of the researchers have investigated the interaction between language and culture. They believe that language and culture are integrated. Also 76. 69% of the researchers maintain that human communication and translation have got cultural foundations. Moreover, 35.13% of the investigators believe that investigations in the areas of human communication such as language teaching, literature, and translation influence the nature of language, culture, and people's identity. The study shows that language is developed through culture and vice versa. And successful application of language in the world of language teaching, literature, and translation depends on culture and culture helps human beings to discover and develop teaching, learning, and problem solving strategies in the areas of language teaching, literature, and translation. Therefore, the nature of the data implies a cause and effect relationship between these variables. Then educational planning should include the investigation of the cultural origin of the language and the situations in which it is used.

Adverb is a part of speech which may be studied from different aspects, such as morphology, syntax, and semantics. In this research, different ways of adverb formation are examined in both Persian and Russian languages, with a look over structural and semantic aspects of adverbs. In the two languages in question, the system of adverb formation is different within the capabilities of word-formation in either language. Russian's means of adverb formation (affixes) are definitely more developed than Persian's. Each of these affixes in the related languages has different meanings and various productivity mechanisms.

Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833 AD), the renowned English diplomat and ambassador to Iran during the reign of Fath Ali Shah, of Qajar dynasty, undertook the research and compilation of an important book on Iranian history along with his military and political duties. The book was the foremost significant work of a Western scholar in the field of a complete history of Iran. So much attention was paid to the work in the West along with its Persian translation throughout the Indo–Iranian and Persian-speaking world. However since very beginning, even before the publication of the Persian text, a sort of sensitivity was raised by some who believed that the translation did not match the actual text sufficiently; even, some scholars believed, it was so inharmonious with the source text that resulted in a new English translation of the Persian text. This article, by examining Sir John Malcolm’s work and his motive for writing the book, has tried to evaluate the conformity of the Persian translation with the English text.

This essay studies and compares characters in The Canterbury Tales from four perspectives: with regard to the 14th century social conditions, religious beliefs, aesthetics, and narration. Sociologically speaking, the characters show a significant relationship with historical, economical, and social events such as the spread of bourgeoisie, the spread of rural life, social corruptions, and peasants’ revolt. Secondly, different religious ideas among pilgrims signify the contrast between people’s religious tendencies and Church, facing failure as to political power. From an aesthetic point of view, characters signify contradictory sensations such as fear from God’s punishment; suffering and aggression, similarly depicted in Gothic art, in one hand, and courtly love, tendency to worldly beauties, and sin, on the other hand. Thus, the change of social values in a transitory society is perceived. Fourthly, the application of vulgar language, frame stories, dialogic viewpoints, and ignorance of time and place at the end of pilgrimage signify narrations based on freedom of speech and confession leading to new ideas such as individuality, people’s social rights, and women’s rights in the Middle Ages. Therefore, the research shows realities of thoughts and minds in a critical period of human history, which could not have been recorded by historians.