Journal of Language and Translation
Volume:10 Issue: 1, Spring 2020

Most postcolonial African writers choose English as the language of their literary works for the reason of wider audience reception but come to indigenize it to decolonize the colonial tool, i.e. colonial language. The translinguistic process of relexification means subverting colonial cultural imperialism and colonial linguistic imposition through the dialogic interaction opened in the wake of using colonial language to represent the voices of the dispossessed amid a heteroglotic milieu. Relexification is the linguistic reflec- tion of polyglotic multilingual postcolonial milieu. Studying relexification in Chinua Achebe‟s rural nov- el, Things Fall Apart, the present paper intends to delineate that while colonial literary discourse is mostly monologic as it voices mainly the colonizer, postcolonial literary discourse is the dialogic bringing to- gether of voices and forces from both sides. The synchronic study of relexification can reveal that the hy- bridization strategy triumphs on three axes of linguistic transposition, rhythmic transposition, and folklor- ic transposition. The paper is limited to linguistic transposition. First through the theoretical saturation method, samples of lexical borrowing, cushioning, and code-mixing were spotted in the corpus. Next the samples were thematically analyzed to derive implications of relexificatin in textual context. Discourse analysis revealed broader dialogic and subversive implications of relexification in postcolonial polyglot discourse. Implementing literary relexification in his novels, Achebe extends the frontiers of English by creating a new English literary form.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the importance of skopos in the translation of political texts from English into Persian. To do this, 30 Iranian translators were conveniently selected and equally divided into the in-house and freelance translators. They were asked to translate a translation test encompassing 10 short political texts that were extracted from English news websites. The point was that the in-house translators were provided with the skopos and were informed of the intended audiences, whereas the freelancers were not given the skopos and were not aware of the intended readers. Davies' (2003) taxonomy was applied as a valuable criterionto discover translation strategies used by each group of the participants. Finally, the success of each group of the professional translators was determined according to Vermeer's (1989/2000) skopos theoretical model. The findings indicated that from Davies' translation strategies, the in-house translators employed the target text (TT) oriented strategies that led to very functional and the TT-oriented translations as well as their success in fulfilling the defined skopos. By contrast, the freelance translators applied the source text (ST) oriented strategies and made the translations that were oriented towards the ST. This resulted in their failure to accomplish the translation skopos. The independent samples t test was also applied to find out the difference between the in-house and freelance translators. According to the results, there was a significant difference between their performance and employment of translation strategies.

The notion of Translation Quality Assessment has been the object of many studies. TQA as the compre- hensive treatment of translation evaluation, focuses on the relationship between the source text and target text and also emphasizes that translation is a linguistic operation. To accomplish this research, House‟s model of TQA was chosen as the framework for the investigation of “The Graveyard” by Gaiman and its Persian translation by ObeydiAshtiani. The aforementioned model involved qualitative aspects which fo- cus on lexical, syntactic and textual means under the main categories of field, tenor and mode. Subse- quently, the categorization of the translation as either overt or covert was done. The findings and out- comes of this analytic and comparative study demonstrated that the Persian translation did not follow the original one in several cases and was ultimately categorized into a covert translation where cultural filter has been applied.

In the globalization era, some translation scholars are of the belief that the ongoing process of globaliza- tion among different and diverse languages and cultures brings about incomprehensibility in translation products. By contrast, some others believe that the globalization trend leads to comprehensible transla- tions. The present research investigates the comprehensibility of the Persian translations of the novels The Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. To this aim, the translations conducted during two time spans of the second and the third waves of globalization were selected in order to examine whether the globalization trend generated comprehensibility in the translation products. Furthermore, the way comprehensibility was developed in the translations of the no- vels was explored in this research.

Coursebooks are normally written to contain information, instruction, exposure, and activities that learn- ers at a particular level need to enhance their communicative competence in the target language. Howev- er, many global course books make attempts to include content, topics, and texts that do not disadvantage any learner around the world. That is why global course books normally do not reflect the reality of the classroom in terms of the students‟ English proficiency level, interests,wants, and needs. Therefore, it is perhaps up to language teachers to develop, evaluate, and adapt language teaching materials for their own classrooms. This review addresses the issue of the role of teachers as materials developers, and how they can meet materials development demands by exploiting their creativity and employing the principles of developing materials targeted in this study. Consequently, the main purpose of this review is to provide prospective language teachers with certain principles and guidelines on development, evaluation, adapta- tion, and humanization of language learning materials for their EFL learners. Collectively, the major im- plication for this review is to inspire EFL teachers to reflectively use systematic procedures in materials development to design, implement, and evaluate language learning materials rather than simply employ- ing globally harmonious and undisturbed published materials during their instruction.

ELT online materials development, which is a multifaceted multidisciplinary area, is not welcomed by many teachers, because it is demanding, challenging and confusing. They fear facing new technologies in their teaching sessions to avoid failing or being caught by other audiences. Furthermore, they struggle hard in evaluating their pod/vodcasts. In order to remove the fears and barriers, this qual+quan study con- siders the personality types, natural potentials to perceive abstract problems, tendency towards being as- sertive/passive and level of intelligence of 10 IAU professors by asking them to answer four types of questionnaires. They were interviewed and asked to develop podcasts and vodcasts before and after re- ceiving one-month treatments, which were the researchers‟ self-made pod/vodcasts and YouTube‟s short movies about Art Assisted Language Learning (AALL) on the Telegram group, MArt. To evaluate their products, two sets of checklistswere developed based on the codes derived from the interview, the re- searchers‟ studies of the present literature, a panel of ELT experts and two film directors‟ ideas that re- sulted infive main categories of „quality‟, „teacher/presenter features‟,„technical features‟,„scientific fea- tures‟ and „marketing‟. These evolutional yardstickswill hopefully pave the way for online materials de- velopers to reflect on their pod/vodcasts before being analyzedby their audiences worldwide, and to rec- ognize their style of presentation to see whether they are more successful in audio presentation and/or visual one.

Among the contributing factors to learners’ performance, personality traits and levels of parents’ educa- tion have been taken into account in this research. Accordingly, 440 learners, mostly pre-intermediate and a small number of intermediate EFL learners with the age range of 18-25, studying atIAU East Tehran Branch participated in this study. They were asked to complete the Big Five Personality Questionnaire as well as a socio-economic status (SES) sheet for their parents’ education levels. First, the measurement models for investigating the impacts of personality traits and parental education levels on participants’ achievement scores were drawn using the AMOS program. The data was analyzed by means of SEM through the CFA approach. The complete structural model for the Big Five personality factors, parents’ education levels, and students’ achievement scores fit well with the data while the measurement model for the levels of parents’ education did not adequately fit the data. Open-mindedness had a significant negative impact, conscientiousness did not have any significant impact, extraversion had a significant positive effect, agreeableness did not have a significant positive effect, and neuroticism had a slight posi- tive impact on students’ achievement scores. These findings showed that personality traits can be used to predict students’ achievement scores to some degree.

The dualistic nature of the present study explored if there existed any relationship between organizational silence, job insecurity, job satisfaction, and burnout among EFL instructors and if job satisfaction me- diated the latent relationships among organizational silence, job insecurity, and burnout. To this end, 120 EFL instructors from different Azad University branches in the Fars province, Iran, chosen based on one- stage convenience cluster sampling filled out four questionnaires, i.e. questionnaire, Burnout Inventory, and Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire. To investigate any relationship between organizational silence, job insecurity, and burnout among EFL instructors, the researchers performed the Pearson Correlation coefficient. Additionally, to investigate if job satisfaction mediated the relationships between the three variables, the researchers ranpath analysis via Amos 21. The results revealed direct positive relationships between organizational silence, job insecurity, and burnout among EFL instructors and job satisfaction did not mediate these relationships indicating that organizational silence and job insecurity could directly cause burnout or affect the probable level of burnout among EFL instructors and their level of satisfaction did not intervenet he present study provides significant contributions to principals, managers, and organi- zational policymakers in educational settings by warning them of the important factors that cause job bur- nout among EFL instructors and affect their well-being and efficacy.The results also added some more insight about EFL instructors‟ affairs to the body of related literature.

This study intended to develop a model of identity for the Iranian EFL context with emphasize on their language proficiency. Moreover, the study defined learners' opinions about the language and identity and that method would be the best to be taught. The project had a cross-sectional quantitative research design, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data via interviews, questionnaires and language proficiency test. Considering a total population of EFL learners in Iran, a sample of 120 students were randomly se- lected to participate in the study. The students were surveyed by testing their identity perceptions in learn- ing English. As a result, language-specific effects on the learners' identities, and how much competency in language learning would be occurred were the most important aspects of this study. The importance of a second language learning skill alongside the native language was thoroughly explained and its relation- ship to the identity of the language learners was explored and was concluded that there was significant relationship between them. Apart from these discussions, it has clearly seen the importance of the identity of learners and the skill of the learners in the educational implications that have a great impact in this field. Implementation of the methods based on these findings facilitates the emergence and development of a second language system in the learner's mind during the process of learning, and prevents the inter- play of first language patterns with second language patterns.

This study investigated the influence of different input modalities on the Iranian EFL learners' listening comprehension. After administering a paper-based TOEFL among an initial sample of 120 BA learners, majoring in English language translation, 86 students were selected to participate in this study and were randomly divided into three experimental groups, namely, the audio group (A), the video group (V), and the audio/video/caption (AVC) group. Group A received audio treatment, group two received video intervention, and group three was taught listening through AVC treatment. Also, a TOEFL listening test was used as pretest and posttest. Afterwards, oral interviews were administered to extract the attitudes of 30 % of the learners toward the influence of the received treatment on their listening performance. Two-way ANCOVA revealed that input modality had a significant effect on listening comprehension. Results showed that the audio group had the best performance and the AVC group had the least significant performance. Qualitative findings also confirmed that learners gave their positive support and attitude to audio input modality as the best. These findings have some pedagogical implications the most important of which is the match between input modality and the learners' perceptual modality to help them improve their L2 listening comprehension.