Linguistics & Translation

To assess a translated work, just like marking a translation, is a highly subjective task. There is not any objective index according to which, reviewers can assess or mark a translation. So, many reviewers employ a holistic approach to translation quality assessment. Although, there are some models like Waddington’s (2001), which are less subjective, and translation is assessed according to some pre-set criteria. In this paper, Waddington’s model (2001) was applied on the Persian translation of George Orwell’s 1984, by Baluch. Twenty paragraphs were chosen randomly and compared and contrasted precisely with their parallel translations to assess the quality of translation. By close investigation of the model, Waddington’s model turned to be incomplete, regarding translation shifts and additions. Besides, the holistic method proved not to be sufficient as it should be and the model is more of academic contexts, rather than appropriate for general use for Translation Quality Assessment.

Hafez was a Persian mystic and poet who is well-regarded and remembered for his lyrical poetry written in ‘Ghazals’, a complex and exclusively Persian verse-form. Like other Sufi poets, Hafiz merged themes of ambiguity into his poems which has become an inseparable feature of his poetry. An important source of ambiguity in natural languages, and particularly in poetry, is the polysemy of lexical elements. The purpose of this study is the identification of the lexical items which have been ambiguous and consequently seems to have been problematic for translators in rendering them into English. In addition, the study aims at recognizing the strategies at translators’ hand in dealing with these lexical elements. In order to extract the data, eight poems of Hafez have been randomly selected. Nine couplets of the poems that have been found to contain lexical ambiguities are randomly selected. Following the identification of the ambiguities, the translations of them by two to five translators have been analyzed to find out the strategies used by the translators in the translation of ambiguous items. The result of the study shows that while in many cases translators have attempted to use the context as a source of disambiguation and consequently transfer one of the meanings of the ambiguous item, in other cases they have used other strategies such as clarifications in the forms of parenthesis and footnotes.

In recent years with the advent of technology in people’s life, the use of audio visual material to assist learners in their language learning experience especially EFL learning contexts has been integrated into the curriculum design in many countries. The use of video as an audio-visual aid in foreign language classrooms with the emphasis on communicative language teaching has attracted the attention of language teachers, SLA researchers as well as learners and it is apparent that the use of such useful learning tool can be a great help for language learning. In this study the effect of frequent exposure to audio- visual material on Iranian EFL learner shave been investigated. In order to conduct the study 40 Iranian intermediate students have been selected out of a pool of 200 based on their result in a placement test. The selected participants were randomly assigned into two groups of experimental and control each containing 20 learners. The listening ability of the participants were tested by a pre-test before start of the treatment and no significant difference have been observed. After a period of two month in which the experimental group received treatment of exposure to authentic audio visual material a round of post-test was administrated and the scores obtained from two groups was compared using a t-test. It was observed that the experimental group who have received the treatment achieved significantly better scores. It was concluded that frequent exposure to audio visual material has a positive impact on improvement of learners’ listening ability.

This work sets out to interrogate the phonological processes involved in the formation of multisyllabic nouns in the Izii and Ezaa dialects of the Igbo language using the autosegmental method of analysis. The data were gathered using the personal interview method. Six respondents, three males and three females were sampled and one hundred and fifty words randomly selected from the Ibadan 400 Word List (as outlined in Udoh (2004) were used and the interview was recorded electronically. In the findings, the phonological processes of deletion, elision and insertion were mainly used while the results of the processes were inflectional as no change of word class was recorded. However, some of the processes produced contour tones, closed syllables as well as consonant clusters especially in Ezaa dialect portraying unusual phonological features when compared with other dialects of the Igbo language.

The language of emotions, a field of research usually neglected in documentary linguistics, requires a strict methodological framework. This paper aims at proposing a critical framework for the research on the language of emotions from the standpoint of language documentation, illustrating both from a theoretic and practical point of view the challenges and the potentiality of a fieldwork-oriented research targeting basic emotions and their linguistic encoding.

This paper presents an experiment concerning the contribution of workplace teaching to the better understanding of ESP terminologies. Accordingly, 40 learners majoring in electronic and power engineering were selected based on a language proficiency test. Randomly, they were divided into two experimental and control groups. While the instructional material was the same for both groups, experimental group was taught at the workplace while control group was taught in an academic environment. At the end of the experiment, the findings were compared through t-test. Results after the analysis of the data indicated that who were taught at the workplace gained more ESP vocabulary than those who were taught in academic environment.

When I was 16 I read an abstract about Ernest Hemingway’s story life and his dead. It disappointed me because I didn’t know why he should kill himself with a shotgun. I was encouraged by this question to find an answer to this question. Now I am 22 years old and being an English student is my key chance! Yes key chance because I’ve made a golden house and there is a door and you should be able to answer to all questions in English to pass the door and enter to the house .So knowing English proficiently is the key of entering. But when I decided to choose this article that why Ernest Hemingway killed himself as the same way that his father had done before him I thought that nobody can answer to this question and probably no one knew him more than himself and non of his friends are alive so what should I do ? After thinking a lot finally I found that he was a man that tried to have another Ernest in his stories like in the story of “Charles”! So who he was? I selected short stories & or excepts by early 20 century American author, Ernest Hemingway, Found background information on Hemingway, provided access to print and electronic resources to collect data an critical comments on the Hemingway’s short stories, and provide some time for the reading of the short stories. Finally I got that there is a character in his short stories that has lots of similarities with his characteristic and he was Nick Adams and in my opinion he is the second Ernest who is not dead and every day that Ernest’s books are printing he is born and shows that Ernest is alive and it means that my key chance is in its exact position and with a little pressure the door will be opened and now I am trying …But this is 1.4 of my complete issue.

The case of Non-native English Speaking Teachers (Non-NESTs) teaching English in EFL contexts deserves more attention and research. While it has been argued that these teachers do have their competitive edge, their unique situation has always been underplayed on the notion of the image of a line along which non-natives move towards the native end. The downside of the story is that their linguistic environment is dominated by L1 through life and ridden with errors (student errors when using L2) through work. Yet, they are expected to maintain and improve their proficiency in English and function as perfect models for students. A possible way in which they do this is through strategy use. This study attempts to shed light on the strategies for success local English teachers gradually develop to cope with their unique situation. 23 experienced local teachers of English and 23 advanced non-teachers both Iranian and both balanced by a proficiency test took an 80-item strategy inventory for language learning. The result showed contrastive strategy use for each group. To find out the details of this difference, qualitative analysis was used which highlights the strategies for success which local teachers gradually develop to manage their unique situation.

Naturalness as a main inseparable feature of literary texts may be exposed to some mistranslations or misunderstandings from the part of the translators during the act of translation. A major issue is probably the level of the difficulty of the source text. There is a sever lack of research on the impact of text difficulty on translation naturalness at the micro level with regard to the formal and dynamic equivalents. Accordingly, the current study as an initial attempt in Iran aimed at examining the common elements of word and sentence pertinent to text difficulty and translation naturalness. To this end, the researcher aimed at finding out the relationship between formal and dynamic equivalents for simple and difficult texts. A pool of 86 students participated in the study to serve as the source of data. Having assessed the students’ performances on the tests based on Nida’s criteria, the researcher found a moderate correlation for formal and dynamic equivalents with regard to the simple texts and a strong correlation for formal and dynamic equivalents with regard to the difficult texts. Finally, some implications for translator teachers and syllabus designers were recommended.

This study was an attempt to investigate the extent to which culture, national identity, and globalization are represented in reading comprehension materials currently taught for General English Courses at tertiary level in Iran. To fulfill this purpose, five General English textbooks were randomly selected from among the total number of twenty books published by Iranian writers throughout the country. Drawing on Byram's (1993) model of content analysis, the reading passages of the books were analyzed as the kernel sections of the books. The results of the content analysis revealed that the majority of the reading texts were culturally neutral focusing, for the most part, on scientific issues; and only a small number of texts addressed home culture and national identity; also, texts representing target culture and international culture were not numerous. Thus, conclusions can be drawn that materials prepared for General English Courses in Iran are not adequate for addressing national identity and raising cultural awareness, nor are they sufficient for informing learners of the target and international culture in the era of globalization and cross-cultural communication.