Linguistics & Translation

The present paper addresses politeness strategies used by young adults in Kenyan Universities to replace linguistically tabooed words and phrases related to sex. The main aim of this paper is to guide users on appropriate linguistic strategies to use when confronted with linguistic taboos. The study adopted Brown and Levinson’s Politeness theory (1978) to analyze 11 examples. The study revealed that youths in Kenyan universities employ a variety of politeness strategies to avoid linguistic taboos related to sexuality. The findings could be used to improve current intervention measures on youth’s risky sexual behaviors.

While since a rather long time ago teacher feedback has received a lot of attention in learning a foreign language, quite recently, a gradual but prominent shift has taken place within the field of education, resulting in greater emphasis on learners and learning and less stress on teachers and teaching (Hismanoglu, 2000). An outcome of this event has been more emphasis on language learning strategies (Oxford, 1990). As another sign of increasing emphasis on learners, many studies have focused on the use of journals in EFL classes (Park, 2003). However, the present researcher failed to find any published research on how teacher feedback on EFL students’ journals can contribute to strategies they use for learning English as a foreign language. Thus, this study was conducted to explore contributions of teacher constructive feedback on Iranian EFL students’ journals to their use of language learning strategies. A group of EFL learners received a 3-month treatment of feedback-based journal writing and a control group did not receive any treatment. Prior to and following the treatment, the SILL was administered to the groups. Then, they were required to write journals which were followed by teacher constructive feedback for eight sessions. Pertinent statistical analyses showed that feedback-based journal writing does not have any significant effects on the use of learning strategies by EFL learners. However, longitudinal studies are suggested so that further realities of mental processing can be explored.

This study aimed at researching and investigating the translation of interjections from English into Persian in drama from a skopos-based view. To carry out this study, ten dramas were chosen. Five out of these ten dramas have not been performed on any stages in Iran, but the remaining five dramas were performed at least once. Twenty most commonly used interjections in current English were elicited from Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2009) with their meanings. These interjections were searched in the dramas by the aid of computer softwares (AntConc© And adobe acrobat reader™). Then, the obtained interjections were analyzed through the strategies proposed by Cuenca (2002b). The statistical calculations showed that there is a significant difference between the literal translation and other strategies. This significant difference proved the main hypothesis of the study which was that the most common strategy used for translating interjections by the Persian translators is literal translation. The second hypothesis was proven too in that many interjections used in the Current Persian are the results of interference from English language.

Talking about Arabic language invokes mixed feelings in Iranians. On the negative plane, it brings to mind bitter memories of Arab invasion a millennia ago, when they dominated the empire of Persia for three centuries during which radical changes to the language and culture of Persia were engineered. On the positive side, Arabic is the medium of all religious occasions, and enjoys an air of awe, authority, and sacredness to it. This situation makes Arabic unapproachable and innovations and changes to Arabic language policy and its related educational policies difficult, dangerous, and complicated because one easily runs the risk of being accused of hostility, heresy, or conspiracy against a sacred language. It is for this same reason that the major agency responsible for policy planning and implementation about Arabic resides outside of the organizations commonly in charge of language and educational planning; the responsibility lies with the seminary and other religious circles and anyone outside of that circle talking differently about the language, no matter what his professional credentials are, is considered an intruder and is seen with suspicion. In such an ideologically-driven atmosphere, disentangling beliefs from facts proves daunting. As a consequence, despite its prevalence, the quality of Arabic language teaching in Iran remains a mystery, as no serious large-scale study aiming to subject it to empirical investigation has yet been carried out. Aiming at filling this lacuna, we undertook a study in the hope that we may throw some light on of Arabic language teaching (ALT, henceforth). Our study was informed by theories and practices commonly in vogue in teaching other modern languages, particularly English. Collecting data from a survey administered to 53 Arabic teachers, we found that ALT is a different world from ELT in its various dimensions and it clearly fails to meet the standards of modern language teaching orthodoxy. Teachers were found to be lacking the minimum requirements of language teachers such as proficiency, language teaching methodology knowledge base, and the basics of linguistic knowledge needed for a language teacher.

Translating for children has always been crucial perturbation for professional and non-professional translators as Sprachmittlers. This is owing to conjectural vulnerability of this cohort of people in conditions of their world of childhood. When we embark on translating for children, we should bear in mind that a text is not a stable/durable object: it brings along a different response at every reading. Therefore, we are dealing with various readings and also a wide range of interpretations. In this respect, we bring out Skopos Paradigm as for the fulfillment of our intention in translating for children since this paradigm parks more fully-grown the pree of purpose and situation of the clientele (e.g. children). Whatever a story or written form is, when translating for this intended group of people, what matters is the maintenance of function-aim-among possible yet pertained interpretations.

English, Kurdish, and Persian belong to Indo-European languages and they have the same proto form so they are called related (family) languages. As these languages have the same common ancestor, it is clear that they have some similar linguistic items regarding syntax, semantics, morphology, pragmatics, etc. But as they are spoken in different distinct areas, they may have some differences regarding these items. One of these linguistic items is grammatical aspect. This study was conducted to define and describe the concept and function of grammatical aspect in languages like English, Kurdish, and Persian to find if there were any similarities and differences among them. To do this, first the notions of aspect, tense, and time and also the difference between grammatical and lexical aspect were defined clearly. Then grammatical aspect was defined and described in each language by drawing separate tables. At the other part of the article, I compared grammatical aspect in three languages and found that there were some similarities and differences among these languages concerning grammatical aspect. Finally, the article concluded with making some conclusions and recommendation for those who want to learn these languages as second or foreign language. I hope this study can help the learners and teachers in facilitating the process of teaching/learning, and so do for translators and researchers to do their work better.

Abstract Sound symbolism is the term for a hypothesized systematic relationship between sound and meaning (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala 1994). There has been considerable speculation and anecdotal evidence on this point from ancient times up to the present time (de Brosses 1765; Jespersen 1933). Reportedly, this correspondence between sound structure and meaning of words has been suggested to facilitate language acquisition and the process of word learning in both children and adults. With this in mind, the present study investigates the influences made by the relation between sound structure and meaning of the words in English – sound symbolism – on Iranian IELTS candidates' vocabulary learning and application, after being exposed to phonosemantic characteristics of words in English. A number of 60 male and female learners were randomly chosen and divided into experimental and control groups. Both groups were asked to fill out a questionnaire consisting of 40 questions, containing must-learn vocabularies for the test, in two levels of post-test and pre-test. Comparison between the results of pre-test and post-test of the experimental and control groups indicated that this non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning and learners’ awareness does influence the vocabulary learning and category distinction abilities of Iranian IELTS candidates extensively. 

Language serves as an appropriate medium of interaction for society and society is a matrix in which the language is emerged; therefore, they have very close relationships. The terms bilingualism, language shift, language choice can indicate that in certain conditions different varieties of language are used. The way society members choose varieties of a language or switch toward another code can determine the influence of social factors on language choice (Freidoni, Jahandideh 2010) . It is a fact that only a minority of the third generation (grandchildren) of the people who migrate to a new society maintain bilingual; since it is a predominant pattern by the third generation to use- only- the spoken language of that particular community. However, it seems to be of a different case with the Armenians in Iran. Iran as a multilingual society is a suitable community in which the different varieties of language are used to serve different functions. Isfahan, one of the Iranian provinces, is a good representative of multilingualism in Iran; after Tehran, Isfahan has got the second rank regarding the density of Armenian population. After approximately 400 years of the arrival of their first generation to Iran, we can still see that Armenian people remain bilingual. According to our data analysis and the results obtained from questionnaires – distributed among 60 participants from three different generations – the major factor which keeps Armenians from moving away from their ethnicity, culture and language is their prejudice towards the factors above.

The basic purpose of this study is to investigate how English language cohesive devices are exploited in a news text. The analysis has been carried out on news article “The Pleasure of Reading” by Zubeda Mustafa published in one of the famous newspaper- Dawn news. Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework was applied for the cohesion analysis. Halliday and Hasan (1976) provided the concepts of referencing, ellipsis, conjunction, substitution and lexical cohesion which have been analyzed in the present study. The study establishes the fact that all the above mentioned cohesive elements are exploited in the text which have ultimately contributed to clarify the overall meanings of the text by binding it in a more organized way. It has been observed that news writers do introduce cohesion in order to give a sense of connection and order in the text. In fact, these cohesive devices provide a sense of connectivity and unity in the text.

By adopting a language-oriented, problem-solving perspective, the present paper investigated the effect of grammatical proficiency on translation quality when translating English indirect speeches into Persian and the methods Iranian translators use to translate such a structure. A null hypothesis was formulated and 30 MA translation studies students were randomly chosen to take part in two tests: advanced grammar and translation test. A correlation test was used to determine the degree of go-togetherness between the two sets of scores. The result (rXY=0.824) rejected the null hypothesis, indicating a strong positive relationship between the two variables. Also, by analyzing translations, translated indirect speeches were categorized into five classes: Censorship, Lexical Translation, Free Translation, Direct Translation and Correct Translation. Finally, a simple model for translating English indirect speeches was proposed. The result indicates a gap in participants’ English knowledge which requires further studies to investigate the reason behind this shortcoming in Iranian context. The proposed model can be used in forming problem-solving curriculums for translation courses and further research is needed to cover other aspects in this respect.