فصلنامه مطالعات زبان و ترجمه
سال پنجاه و چهارم شماره 1 (بهار 1400)

In any society, patronage always attempts to control and direct materials produced for the young population, and Iran is no exception. Thanks to the large flow of translated children’s literature published in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, several literary institutions were established to manage the flow. They introduced various measures and their policy on award offerings appears to be the most effective one, yet, it has not been fully studied and researched. The aim of this study was to investigate how these institutions’ policy on award offerings had affected translated and domestic children’s books during the early years of their establishment. Accordingly, all award-winning translated and domestic children’s books during the period of 1340/1961 to 1357/1978 were collected from two comprehensive resources, and they were analyzed in SPSS. The quantitative analysis offered insights into major institutions, award winners and qualified publishers. Drawing on discourse analysis, the authors extracted the main themes revolving around award winners and they were compared and contrasted to find any possible harmony. Overall, the results revealed that the institutions preferred to choose children’s books, which were written by Iranian authors, and translated books were not their priority. Additionally, fictions were favored over nonfictions. Their award-offering policy was also ideologically oriented since awarded books contained common themes.

Translation quality has always been an important research topic as it concerns both the product and process of translation. Translation quality can be affected by a wide array of factors, psychological traits. The present study examined the relationship between emotional and multiple intelligence and translation quality. A mixed-methods approach guided the study. The population consisted of female and male second-year MA students at Islamic Azad University (Tabriz Branch) and University of Nabi Akram in 2015 (N = 65). The sample, however, included 49 students who were chosen from the above-mentioned universities following a stratified sampling technique. To assess students’ translation quality, House’s Translation Quality Assessment model was employed. As to the research instruments, Bar-On’s emotional intelligence and Gardner’s multiple-intelligence questionnaires were used. The results showed that happiness as an emotional intelligence component had a significant relationship with students’ translation quality. In addition, the components of verbal/linguistic, visual/spatial and body in multiple intelligence had a significant relationship with the translation quality of students. The mediating role of gender was explored and the analysis suggests its significant relationship with emotional, multiple intelligence and translation quality.

Examining the author’s cogito, which is his consciousness, is a common research strand in literary criticism and has been the focus of many renowned authors. Louis Ferdinand Celine made use of this in his novel Journey to the End of the Night through repetitive themes. According to Georges Poulet, individuals gain knowledge of the world in accordance with their surrounding world. For Poulet, place is one of the fundamental categories of communication with the world. The author’s world consciousness, as Poulet maintains, can be uncovered by the analysis of narrator’s perception of the place. The present work follows an analytical-descriptive approach and aims to exploring author’s cogito in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night according to Georges Poulet’s theory. The study hypothesizes that the way the narrator describes space and place can reveal the author’s cogito, which is a reflection of Bardamu’s relationship with the author’s perception of the world. In this autofiction, the narrator recounts his life, wanderings and travels in different places.

Translator studies, as a recent subfield of Translation Studies, focuses explicitly on translators rather than translated texts since translators create texts. While translators have been studied from different cultural and cognitive perspectives, their translatorial style from sociological perspectives has been remained underexplored. Against this backdrop, this study used Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a sociological theory to study major traces of Saleh Hosseini’s habitus in his translatorial style. To this end, a corpus from samples of Moby-Dick; Or the Whale and To the Lighthouse and their Persian translations was made. To study the samples, AntConc outputs were examined at morphological, lexical, and phrasal levels. Moreover, a semi-structured interview was conducted with Saleh Hosseini to complement and validate the findings. The results indicated that several aspects of Saleh Hosseini’s translatorial style, including his tendency towards using Arabic, literary, and archaic words, together with his inclination to use a wide variety of lexical items and sequence of genitive can be accounted for by the fields he comes from; in other words, his cultural capital and his primary and secondary habitus. His fields, life experiences, and interactions with various agents have shaped his style in translation, which can be known as Saleh Hosseini’s archaic style.

Never Let Me Go (2005) is a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the British- Japanese writer. His novels vary in terms of structure, plot, and themes. Never Let Me Go is one of his famous science fiction novels, which criticizes the social norms of the society. The novel focuses on the lives of students at Haillsham Boarding School, from the viewpoint of Cathy, an oppressed person, who has been dominated by injustice laws for many years. The present research seeks to explore the novel from the point of view of deconstruction. The study draws on the concepts of deconstruction proposed by Jacque Derrida, the French philosopher and the founding father of deconstruction strategy. Although Ishiguro’s novels have been vastly studied from numerous perspectives, there have been only a few attempts to investigate the post-structuralism concepts and themes in the novel. Accordingly, this study attempts to examine three concepts of deconstruction, i.e., the arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified, binary opposition, and decenterism in Never Let Me Go. It employs Derrida’s deconstruction theory to examine if and how by using the above-mentioned concepts, Never Let Me Go shows the readers the complexity of symbols presenting different layers of meanings which are at times opposite. The study found that different and opposite meanings of the symbols are constructed through the arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified, binary opposition, and decenterism.

Using or not using the first language has been considered a challenging issue among language teachers. The use of the first language in teaching has been affected by the traditional methods of language teaching, which for some researchers has no theoretical or practical justification. However, with the advent of the CLT approach, teachers were allowed to use the L1 judiciously. In this study, an attempt is made to examine how language teachers use the first language in different situations in EFL classes. Observation and interview analysis were used to gather data. The results of this study showed that teachers use first language in the following areas: 1) teaching grammar; 2) teaching expressions and proverbs; 3) teaching vocabulary; 4) aiding comprehension; 5) establishing discipline; 6) clarifying cultural issues; 7) comparing L2 structures with those of learners’ L1 and 8) defining the function of words and sentences. Moreover, the Chi-square (X2) test was used to find significant differences among male and female teachers. Overall, this study provided insights into how to better incorporate first language into L2 language classes, basing our arguments on the teachers’ experiences.

In line with new findings in the interdisciplinary fields of philosophy and psychology of emotions and cognition, the use of emotional scales in assessing readers’ reactions to the texts containing moral dilemmas has attracted the attention of researchers. Likewise, this study, using the Delphi technique and the opinions of experts tried to predict the emotional-cognitive reactions of two groups of deontic and consequentialist readers to the texts containing moral dilemmas. For this purpose, a mixed-methods research was chosen and a three-phase Delphi technique was used for collecting the data, i.e., experts’ opinions. The expert group consisted of nine university English teachers and psychologists fluent in English. First, the experts were provided with six strategic questions to be able to comment. After coding and converting the qualitative data into quantitative data and preparing a concept map, first, the percentage of the pairwise agreement between the raters was calculated, and then, the formulas of Krippendorff’s alpha and Fleiss Kappa were used to determine the reliability of the 72 pairs of decisions. Accordingly, the acceptable values ​​of 0.76, 0.72, and 0.71 were obtained for the mentioned formulas. Based on the results of the two stages of the Delphi technique, a 9-point Likert scale questionnaire was developed and re-assessed by the experts. After rating the questionnaire items by the experts, the intra-class correlation coefficient with the two-way random effect model was used. A significant value of 0.872 was obtained from this calculation, which confirmed the congruence of experts’ opinions about the probable behaviors of the two groups of readers in reaction to the texts containing ethical dilemmas. This should be noted that the collection of experts’ opinions and the evaluation of the reliability of the opinions, in three consecutive rounds, took about four months.