Linguistics & Translation

Titles are multi-layered and functional in nature. In the recent years, the academic field of titrology has paid particular attention to the analysis of titles from different scopes, but research on the translation of titles has been very limited, especially in the context of Persian language. This study has addressed structural differences and generic peculiarities of book titles and investigates the translation methods adopted by Iranian translators. To this aim 180 English book titles and their translations were analyzed according to the methodology proposed by Nord (1995) and their translation strategy is categorized according to Vinay-Darbelnet's model of translation strategies. The results showed Iranian translators' preference of direct translation methods, while indirect strategies were applied where generic conventions and cultural differences imprinted structural and lexical shifts.

Binomials – as a subcategory of collocation- consist of two words from the same category which are joined with a linguistic link. Like collocations, binomials are mostly language specific. Therefore getting familiar with binomials for any translator is an important task which is usually overlooked. As a result, they produced body of language which usually seems unnatural from viewpoint of target language audience. This study attempts to evaluate the naturalness of translated binomials in the genre of political speeches and to introduce procedures producing natural equivalence. The result showed that although the literal translation procedure proved to render natural translation in 54% of cases, the translators overused this procedure (86%) and overlooked the idiomatic nature of binomials and thus produced unnatural or binomials which does not sense in English. Therefore they fail to render the intended political effect.

Present study aims at exploring the phenomenon of graffiti and its presence in Pakistan. It also sets to investigate the frequency of different themes exhibited through graffiti and their corresponding relationship to socio-cultural and religious ideologies and attitudes of inhabitants of this part of the world. For given purpose the historical city of Lahore, which is also considered the hub of culture and education in country, was chosen as this practice is found in profusion there especially in areas under consideration locally named as Model Town, Centre Point, Hussain Chowk, etc. Graffiti is treated as a pliant feature of contemporary metropolitan setting and an ever-trendy researchable issue in academic research. Our contention here is not to label graffiti as a social territorial crime or a rebellious facet on the part of graffiti artists rather a social behavior and its relation to existing religious beliefs and socio-cultural norms of existing Pakistani social mosaic.

The present paper attempts to investigate the influence of Mawlana, the 13th century Persian poet, through translations done of his work in the West. Translation of Mawlana’s works started in Germany in 1809. In 1881 Redhouse started translation of Mawlana in English, later other translators like Winfield in1887, Wilson in 1910, and Nicholson in 1935, created their translations. Bark in 1995 created his version of the Masnavi according to Nicholson’s translation. Then, Helminski in 1994 and 1996 created his version. Helminski’s version like Bark’s was according to Nicholson’s translation. These translations caused Mawlana’s thoughts and works penetrate among the whole people of the world. Among them Americans have bigger portions.

To carry out this research, Baku Today news site was selected as the source of news. The number of headlines arrived at a total of 200. This research was directed toward studying the syntactic and lexical features of headlines. The investigation began with the description of the basic units of analysis in the English headline structures (categories, word classes, constructions). In doing so, for the analysis of the structure of English headlines, the grammatical framework provided by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Savartvik (1985) was chosen. As mentioned before, this study pinpointed the cases of utilization of lexical and syntactic features in Azeri headlines in order to see in what ways they are organized. Below is a brief description of syntactic and lexical features.

Register as one of the main issues in translation studies has been a topic of some discussions lately and most of the translation researchers have been in favor of it and used it to assess the translations quality or find ways to translate register. However, there is a sever lack of research on the impact of some factors on translation of register that that factor in current study is interpersonal intelligence. To this end, the researcher aimed at finding out the relationship between interpersonal intelligence and translation of register in different characters. The study contains a pool of 28 students participated as the source of data including two groups of experimental and control. Pearson Correlation Coefficient was administered where SPSS V18 was used for statistical analysis. Having separately assessed the students’ performances in two groups in two session of pre-test and post-test after two different terms on the tests based on Gardner’s and Kim’s assessment criteria, the researcher found a positive moderate correlation between the two variables of instruction of interpersonal intelligence and translation of register. according to comparison of relationship between two groups it is discovered that in experimental group that there was treatment (instruction of interpersonal intelligence), the amount of increase in scores was much more than that of control group that was not instructed interpersonal intelligence. Therefore, the study showed that having a high interpersonal intelligence and instructing of it could effect on knowing the verbal and non-verbal feeling of the characters and translating their register and variety of languages best.

This study focused on investigating the relationship between making requests on one hand, and economic status, level of education and formality of context on the other. It examined the differences in the realization of requests in one area of Iran, i.e. Shahrekord, to account for pragmatic variations based on these three variables. To this end, sixty young couples based on their education and economic status were selected and surveyed in six different situations: 1) indoors, alone; 2) indoors, close family gatherings; 3) indoors, formal gatherings; 4) outdoors, with their relatives; 5) outdoors, being with a stranger; 6) outdoors, formal situations. A discourse completion test (DCT) was used as an elicitation device and a Chi-square was run to analyze the data. The results showed the preference order for the type of request used as direct, conventional indirect and non-conventional indirect. It was also found that as the degree of formality of context increases, the use of mitigation devices tends to increase as well.

The present research is about the omission of schwa in Pakistani English as observed in the electronic media of Pakistan and can be taken as an extension of the works carried out by Tariq Rahman, Robert J. Baumgardner, and Riaz Hassan. The research has been carried out in order to determine the variations emerging in the variety of English used in Pakistan. It has been observed that this variety abounds in phonological deviations which are so recurrent in their frequency that they have emerged as a distinct linguistic feature of this variety. Among these phonological variations schwa has been found to be the most peculiar in its behaviour. In order to determine its peculiar behaviour the research was conducted on 750 participants taken from 200 current affairs programmes from four domestic news channels, and the participants were observed for the phonological variations in their speech. It was found out that omission of schwa is a regular feature of Pakistani English.

This study investigated some cross-linguistic properties of poetic and prosaic genre through the compilation and application of a parallel corpus. To this end, 16 stories from Sa'di's Gulistan (Rose Garden) and three translations of the book by Gladwin, Ross and Rehatsek were compared. Regarding the general contentions in terms of explicit hypotheses about the translations, four hypotheses were formulated to test two translation universals, i.e., simplification and explicitation. The analysis of the data demonstrated significant cross-linguistic differences in the original Persian text and its translations as pertinent to the intended properties.

This study investigated ideological and cultural aspects of literary translation by specifically focusing on the analysis of the textual features of a literary source text, namely, Morier’s Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, a novel originally published in English in 1823, and its corresponding translated target text, namely, Sargozašt-e ??ji B?b?-ye E?fah?ni, rendered into Persian by Mirza ?abib I?fahani in the 1880s. Employing Halliday’s (1985) systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as well as Venuti’s “domesticating/ foreignizing” dichotomy for the analysis and assessment of translated works, the researchers analyzed the TT by accounting for the sets of constraints within which the expression of ideology and cultural elements take place. In order to indicate the translator’s ideological orientations, the study concentrated on the analysis of a number of textual features, namely, “nominalizations”, “voice shifts”, “modality shifts”, “agency shifts”, “expansions”, “contractions”, and “thematic progressions”. Domestication and foreignization strategies in the translated text have also been investigated to see if the translator had to apply any of the two strategies especially in translating cultural elements. The study finally comes up with the conclusion that the TT has been under the influence of ideological and cultural manipulations by the translator in order to conform to the target culture’s textual and social values.