JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION
Year:2012 | Volume:3 | Issue:1|Papers Count:8

This study strives to investigate the importance of 'regional variation' in accepting and rejecting the words coined by the Iranian Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL). A total of 500 students from state universities in Tehran were chosen as prticipants provided with a questionnaire consisting of 50 APLL equivalents. As used in the media, 62% of the first 25 APLL words were accepted by the respondents; however, the second 25 equivalents, which were of zero frequency in the media, were accepted by 38% of the respondents. of 493 respondents, who returned the questionnaires, 60% were undergraduates, 30% were pursuing MA while 10% were working on their doctoral dissertation. Close to half the Undergraduates and Masters and only a little more than half of the PhD students have accepted the equivalents. The percentages of APLL word acceptance and rejection among Tehrani respondents and non-Tehrani respondents are 48% and 52%, respectively, showing that there is no significant relationship between the response of those living in Tehran or other cities/towns and the acceptance and rejection of the APLL words. Meanwhile, as for dialects/accents, there is no significant relation between using dialects (or accents) other than standard Persian and the acceptance and rejection of the APLL words either.

This study aimed at investigating oral error correction preferences of Iranian EFL learners, and the degree of teachers' awareness of them. To this end, one hundred and fifty language learners (males and females) from intermediate and advanced levels of instruction and different ages (15-45), studying at five language institutes took part in this study. As a further step, fifty teachers were asked for cooperation. This article discusses the findings of a questionnaire that utilized 5-point Likert-scales, and investigated 1) students' preferences for "how", "when", "who", "which", and "should" of correcting oral errors, and 2) teachers' awareness of these preferences. The results showed that students had generally positive attitudes toward teacher correction of oral errors. They also liked immediate correction of pronunciation errors and delayed correction of grammatical errors the results also indicated a preference for teacher correction and self-correction of errors over peer correction. Furthermore, they preferred correcting pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary errors over other types of errors. The teachers were aware of the students' preferences of some cases, but unaware in some other.

Despite the extensive research on translation and challenges on translation of figurative language, in particular idioms and proverbs, little is achieved to solve the challenges. The corpus of the study was an English translation of the novel Pinocchio and its Persian translation. The name of the novel is ' The Adventures of Pinocchio'. The aim of this case study was to explore the strategies which were applied for translating idioms and proverbs in the corpus of the study from English to Persian and identify the most frequently used strategies. Therefore, the corpora were examined and a total of 200 idioms and nine proverbs were explored. The data were analyzed to find the most frequent strategies and to see whether the translation of idioms and proverbs was idiomatic and natural. The findings reveals that translation by paraphrasing at 86% and replacing proverb with an equivalent local proverb at 66.66% were applied in translation of idioms and proverbs respectively. It also shows that the translator translated the idioms and proverbs in an idiomatic and natural way.

Current tendencies show necessity of expanding our understanding of learner independence and its role in learning and technology. In this study, a quasi-experiment was conducted to determine whether computer assisted grammar teaching affects students' grammar learning. For the purpose of homogeneity, the Nelson Test (050A) was administered and fifty male learners from Nemoneh Dolati Noor junior high school in Pakdasht, southeast of Tehran province, were selected from among seventy participants. Before teaching grammar points, a thirty-item grammar test was administered as a pre-test to both groups. After the experimental group received grammar points through power point and control group through chalk and board, both groups were tested again. The results showed that software assisted grammar teaching had significant advantage over the traditional method. It is possible that the novelty of the exposure method could raise the students' motivation to more participate and focus. In addition, the feeling of independence could result in higher self-esteem and confidence. The findings have implications for material designers, teachers and teacher trainers, and provide suggestions for further research.

This study was an attempt to investigate the efficiency of task-based instruction in improving reading comprehension ability in Iranian EFL students. To carry out the research, 102 Iranian university students were considered as the participants of the study. Following the administration of a standard Cambridge Key English Test (KET) as a pre-test, they were later randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. During the experiment, the experimental group received some supplementary material in the form of reading comprehension tasks, while the control group was given a placebo. Both groups received the same standard KET as a post-test (since the study focused on reading comprehension ability, the listening section of the KET was no used in the post-testing), to compare their reading comprehension ability improvement, as well as a final test, to examine the two groups' end-of-the-course language proficiency development, at the end of the experiment. Undoubtedly, the reliability and validity of the instruments were taken into consideration during the course of experiment. Subsequently, the obtained test scores were analyzed. The outcome of the analyses revealed a noticeable progress in the performances of experimental group on the tests. The results could, to a large degree, help the researcher to conclude that compared to the conventional (i.e., exercise based) method of teaching reading comprehension, task-based instruction was more effective in accelerating reading comprehension ability and in improving end-of-the-experiment language proficiency development in Iranian EFL university students.

Every society has its own culture, values, and ideology. Translations convey the meaning as well as cultural and ideological values, beliefs, ideas and norms from source culture to target culture. One type of translation which nowadays is popular among people, and can attract so many audiences in different ages is Audiovisual Translation (AVT), particularly dubbing. If there is difference between values of source and target culture, it may cause conflict, i.e. some words and sentences in source culture can be used without any problem but they may be considered taboo in the target culture, and the people of target society might avoid using them. If the translator transfers such taboo words and sentences to the target culture, she/he will violate the norms of the society. Therefore, audiovisual translator should be equipped with different strategies in order to tackle such problems in the process of translation. This study attempts to determine the most frequent strategies in dubbing taboo words and sentences in romantic films which have been dubbed from English into Persian within the third decade after the Islamic Revolution in Iran by using Toury's (1995) framework for classification of norms. This study will also investigate the norms which contribute to dubbing taboos from English into Persian in that period of time.

Metamemory refers to a person's knowledge about the contents and regulation of memory. It plays an important role in planning, allocation of cognitive resources, strategy selection, comprehension monitoring, and evaluation of performance. These are two main structural components of metamemory-declarative knowledge, which enables a person to evaluate the contents of memory, and procedural knowledge, which enables a person to monitor and regulate memory performance. The concern of this study was to investigate whether teaching procedural metamemory strategies has any effect on reading comprehension of EFL learners. Sixty female intermediate Iranian EFL students, chosen from among 100 students based on their scores on an English proficiency test were randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group. In an instructional period, the experimental group received the treatment; that was instruction and practice on procedural metamemory strategies, and the control group received a placebo, that was a routine practice of reading comprehension. Finally the two groups' performances on a reading comprehension posttest were compared using a t-test, the result of which revealed that the treatment had a significant effect on the learners' reading comprehension. The proposed null hypothesis of the study was, thus, rejected.

Translation of Children's literature is a significant area of study, due to the fact that books for children have always been written by real authors at real places in different languages, and they have been and still are read, in translations into other languages, in all over the world. As a result of internationalism and multiculturalism, children's literature is translated into languages more increasingly, which means that the translated works need to be adapted to the young reader's language in every instance. Iran is one of the importers of foreign children's literature, which has many young addresses. One of the questions which usually arises in translation for children is whether proper names should be translated or not. The present study is based on Van Coillie's model of translating strategies of proper names in children's literature. Through conducting this thesis, twenty-five English books and their translations in Persian were selected. After extracting and comparing all proper names, the researcher concluded that the strategy of reproduction is the most commonly used one in translating proper names from English into Persian. Hence, preserving the foreign names in translating for children could lead to further the international outlook and understanding of the young readers.