فصلنامه مطالعات زبان و ترجمه
سال چهل و دوم شماره 2 (پاییز 1389)

Lionid Nikolayevich Andereef is a famous Russian writer of the 19th and 20th centuries, whose few works have been translated and printed in Iran. In this article, the authors have tried to write a few lines about his social, political and psychological thoughts and ideas. Andereef, who, on the one hand, was involved with social and revolutionary crises, and, on the other hand, faced various social and literary ideas and movements, experienced many different ideas, thoughts and inclinations in different periods of his life. He briefly worked with all modern literary schools, and in his long way from Realism to Symbolism, through combining these two schools, he gave a special delicacy and freshness to his works. He always sought answers for his numerous questions in life, such as destiny, love, hope, life and death. His novel, Once upon a Time, which was published in his first collection in 1901, clearly speaks of writer’s concerns about life and death. He believes that life is the end point for man, yet after man’s death, life will still go on without him. The hero of the novel, Laverenty Petrovich, is a symbol of contemporary man who is lost in his own physical body, and unaware of his spirit, finally becomes regretful.

Translation studies is a new academic discipline whose life as an independent field of study does not exceed several decades. Translation studies is related to different disciplines especially humanities, encompassing linguistics, sociology, literature, etc., and has borrowed many concepts and methods from such disciplines. Psychoanalysis is one of the disciplines which could be closely related to translation studies. Some studies have been conducted in this area; however, they are still at a preliminary stage and not yet adequately developed. In this study, the researcher has tried to explore some common grounds and relations between psychoanalysis and translation studies. Having explored the status of psychoanalysis in discourse of translation studies, the author has investigated the relation between translation and Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The paper has also dealt with the translation of dreams and has attempted to explore the pleasure-pain principle in translation.

Having dealt with “reiteration” from a literary, discoursal, linguistic and translation studies perspective, this paper has concerned itself with “reiteration” in sacred texts, especially the holy Qur’an, and has investigated the rhetorical, semantic and aesthetic objectives behind such reiterations in the text. An example of lexical Qur’anic reiteration in Sureh “Alaq” has been presented to compare two Persian and two renderings of the text with the original. The discussion proceeds by pointing out the difficult task of translating sacred texts in general and the Qur’an in particular, underlining the rather hard job of rendering Qur’anic reiterations. Regarding the alleged metaphysical and super-human origin of sacred texts and the delicate task associated with rendering such texts, the paper ends by proposing a ‘source-language oriented’ approach, which gives priority to the original text and culture, instead of a ‘target-language oriented’ one, which, on the contrary, grants precedence to the target language and culture, in translating this type of genre.

The main concern of this study is to identify patterns of inequity in instructional materials. The article addresses "Gender imbalance and gender stereotyping in high school and pre-university English textbooks following Rifkin's model. The study was set in a qualitative paradigm based on criterion-driven studies; using feminist's approaches as the underlying theory, however; to enrich the findings both quantitative and qualitative techniques were utilized for data collection and analysis. Descriptive and chi-square statistics were used to analyze data quantitatively, and content analysis was used to analyze the representation of both sexes qualitatively in four English textbooks. The analysis of verbal and pictorial parts showed great imbalance in the representation of males and females in the sense that these books were biased towards males. The overall portrayal of women in the textbooks was low and their subordinated status confirmed the traditional view of gender stereotyping. Overall, these books fairly failed to reflect the wide range of roles played by woman both in Iranian culture and target language culture.

With the development of the media and communication technology in the modern world, advertising has gained international dimensions. The successful introduction of products depends not only on sophisticated advertising techniques but also on meticulous translation of the message when put in an international contest. The more familiar a translator is with the target language and culture, the more successfully the message will be transferred. The present study, surveys the different methods for finding lexical equivalents in a sample of English advertising and commercial texts and their translation into Persian. The results manifested a variety of techniques employed by the translators, the most frequent of which was dynamic translation in the sense Nida (1964) defines. This was followed by a high frequency of transliteration as a very common phenomenon. Other types of equivalents such as borrowings and calques ranked next. It was concluded in the study that a tendency in translators for the application of transliteration and unlimited borrowings were indications of their preference for maintaining the foreign flavor of the text suggesting the originality of the product in order to persuade the customers. This could be an alarm for those in charge of the preservation of Persian language and culture such as the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.

Between 1890 and 1904, after the literary movement of realism and naturalism, the French authors were going to create a new kind of novel. Finally, Romain Rolland (1866-1944) by writing the novel entitled Jean-Christophe created a new kind of novel in French literature, nowadays referred to as the “river novel”. It is a new kind of novel that is very long and may encompass several volumes. In writing this long novel, Rolland was strongly influenced aesthetically by Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace, in Russian. In this novel, Rolland has used the image of the river beautifully in some metaphorical concepts, introducing the expression for the first time. Moreover in the last scene of the novel, at the time of Jean-Christophe’s death, he took advantage of the myth of “Saint-Christophe” and the archetype of the “crossing of the waters”. So, one cannot consider this novel only in terms of a literary genre. This study has investigated the work from three perspectives: the “river novel” as a literary genre, the image of the river, and metaphorical expression. Moreover, the role of myth and symbol in the novel has also been considered.

Translation and writing possess similar approaches and features. This study addressed the relationship between translation and writing in relation to gender differences in translation quality of expressive and informative texts and writing style (expressive vs. informative). The sample of the study included 150 (75 female & 75 male) undergraduate senior students, majoring in English translation randomly selected from 10 universities. They took a translation task of two English paragraphs (expressive & informative) to be translated into Persian. They were, then, requested to write a paragraph in Persian. The quality of translation texts and writing style were assessed by three translation and three linguistics experts, respectively. The data were analyzed separately for each group by employing the t-test and the two-way ANOVA. The results indicated a statistically significant difference between the translation quality of the expressive text and the writing style with regard to the male subjects. The two-way ANOVA results, also, showed a significant relationship between the writing style and the translation quality of the expressive text. No significant relationship, however, was demonstrated between other variables of interest.

Though not every educator approves of the sweeping role the mobile devices can have in education, mobile learning (m-learning) is pushing the limits further taking over a greater share of the tasks. This is basically arising from all the advantages including availability, portability, convenience, versatility, etc. associated with this mode of learning. In that line of thinking, the present study set out to combine the cognitive theories of education and mini- laptop as one important device in m-learning and sought how Iranian learners of the English language experience learning L2 vocabulary. To that end, as many as 161 L2 learners, aged 18-23, were homogenized through a language proficiency test and then placed into four different short term memory (STM) ability groups, using Visual and Verbal Short Term Memory Test (Chen et al., 2005). Also, mini-laptop-based vocabulary presentations with different annotations, i.e., pictorial vs. written, were already prepared and run on the learners’ laptops through Bluetooth application. Their treatment lasted for two sessions and finally they were evaluated on their recognition and recall of vocabulary items taught. The results indicated that the delivery of materials with pictorial or written annotation to learners with high-visual and high-verbal abilities results in better vocabulary learning. Also, the delivery of materials with pictorial annotation to the learners with high-visual ability and their delivery with written annotation to the learners with high-verbal ability results in better vocabulary learning. Low-visual and low-verbal ability group also showed better results under no annotation condition. The results of the study point to the efficacy of congruity between the mode of material presentation and learners’ cognitive orientations.