فصلنامه مطالعات زبان و ترجمه
سال پنجاه و چهارم شماره 2 (تابستان 1400)

A survey of recent studies in audiovisual translation reveals that audio description (AD), as a service of empowerment and accessibility to media for blind or partially sighted audiences, has been increasingly investigated and researched internationally mostly in European counties and the United State, however. This service is newly developing and rarely offered in Iran. This article aims to initially introduce developments and advancements in AD globally and discuss its production process in the world. The article then explores the current status of AD in Iran and reviews the preliminary measures which have recently been taken in this regard. Within an exploratory approach, the required data were obtained through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with AD practitioners in Iran. The findings are classified and presented in six categories. The findings show that the highest proportion of AD production goes to radio and a non-governmental group, Sevina, respectively, and television as a national mass media has not taken any measure in this regard. Besides, the production of AD on the radio has been limited to Iranian feature films, while the products of Sevina group are more diverse. A number of suggestions for future investigations are also presented.

In spite of similarities between Iranian-Islamic rhetoric and English-European rhetoric, figures of speech, figures of expression and semantics have been the focus of the former, while the latter includes accuracy. Also, Iranian-Islamic rhetoric focuses on written rhetoric, whereases spoken rhetoric is the focus of English-European rhetoric. A comparative study of rhetoric in Persian and English, especially in the classification of figures of aesthetics, which is the main focus of this study, helps researchers analyze the aesthetic aspects of speech and enriches our knowledge of rhetoric in linguistics. This research tries to address such questions as how to classify rhetoric in Persian and English, the similarities and differences in the rhetoric classification and rhetorical aesthetics of these two languages. It follows a mixed-methods approach and the data are collected through a library survey. The findings suggest that the comparison of figures of speech in English and Persian should be done in light of semantics and figures of expression. The science of figures of speech in Persian is an independent field of study and is more extensive than English rhetoric, which is not understood as an independent field of study. Figures of speech in English are at times intertwined with figures of expression and meaning. The border of figures of speech in Persian is more distinctive than that of English.

Samuel Beckett’s efforts in dismantling anthropocentrism has ushered a new chapter not only in his oeuvre, which debunks the cliché binary of Man Vs nature, but in the postmodern look at ontology; his negative perspective introduces the man as a hollow body that neither seeks an aggressive independence nor includes a progressive cognitive dominance: the Beckettian man is nothing more than an empty shell. The characters in his plays, too, either lack a perception of the surrounding objects or surprisingly enough see themselves equal to such objects. Beckett’s dramatically negative perception of modern man can be explained as follows: first, the object has left its Heideggerian utilitarian cocoon, and thus cavorts as an object independent of man’s cognitive realm of confirmation; and second, the fall of man from his cognitive throne and into an abyss of stasis reaffirms the former hypothesis. Such a radical shift in his ontological attitude that can best be explained in light of the postmodern philosophy of object-oriented ontology hints at one alarming concept: a holistic ontological effort to reinvent the object as an equal existing entity to man. By debunking the Anthropos as the epicenter of existence, Beckett crafts new layers of being wherein the Hegelian-Nietzschean Übermensche or the creative Leibnizian Monads emerge as the notable absentees; the reality Beckett portrays is founded on the availability or lack thereof of an equal reciprocity between objects and the subject. By examining Beckett’s Act Without Words I and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, this essay explores and challenges the fruits of Beckett’s misanthropic reading of the modern man that lends itself to postmodern reversal of the traditional subject Vs. object binary opposition.

Books written about the history of Persian language appears to focus on transferring knowledge to students only. Despite the significance of students’ needs and their individual differences as well as their personality traits, books have failed to take into account these factors. Of these considerations, mentions could be made of emotions and feelings of students as they largely contribute to positive learning. Emotioncy (emotion + frequency) stresses on emotions evoked by the senses from which we receive inputs, hence learning happens. It stands on a hierarchical matrix of six levels, including Null (0), Auditory (1), Visual (2), Kinesthetic (3), Inner (4), and Arch (5) or more specifically, avolvement (null) and exvolvement (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) to involvement (inner and arch). Drawing on the concept of emotioncy, the present study aims at analyzing and evaluating the content of books written about the history of Persian language. The corpus of the investigation consists of five academic books, namely, The History of Persian Language (by Natel-Khanlari), The History of Persian language (by Abolghasemi), The Brief History of Persian language (by Bagheri) and the History of Iranian Languages (by Rezaei Bagh Bidi). Different levels of emotioncy were examined in the above-mentioned books and the analysis was guided with Chi-squared tests. The findings suggest that there are significant differences among the books in terms of employing emotioncy; therefore, new or updated content would benefit the books. It appears that the employment of emotioncy in drafting books about the history of Persian language could facilitate learning for students as they become emotionally engaged with the teaching content, hence the learnt materials are easily transferred to permanent memory.

The present investigation set out to examine the impact of multidimensional perfectionism on second language listening comprehension through the mediating effects of self-efficacy and metacognitive listening strategies within the Complex Dynamic Systems Approach. To this end, a total of 117 junior and senior EFL students completed the measures of perfectionism, self-efficacy, five distinct types of metacognitive listening strategies, and the IELTS listening comprehension test. Having gathered the data, cluster analysis was used to identify the perfectionism clusters (adaptive, maladaptive and non-perfectionist). Following a multicategorical multiple mediation analysis, the direct, relative indirect, and total effects of perfectionism on listening comprehension were analyzed to probe the postulated hypotheses of the study. Findings showed that perfectionism exerted direct effects on self-efficacy, three metacognitive strategies (person knowledge, mental translation, and problem solving). The direct effects of perfectionism on listening comprehension and planning and evaluation and directed attention strategies were not significant. Self-efficacy also exhibited significant direct effects on person knowledge and listening comprehension. In terms of relative indirect effects, the mediation analysis was significant and while perfectionism did not show a direct effect on listening comprehension, the relative indirect effects as well as the relative total effects through self-efficacy and metacognitive strategies were significant. Therefore, the inclusion of mediating variables made a significant contribution to the relationship between perfectionism and listening comprehension. The instructional implications of the study are discussed too.

The present research is an interdisciplinary study between interpreting studies and psychology. The study tried to predict student trainees’ performance in two simultaneous interpreting exercises, namely oral cloze and listening and memory recall exercises considering EQ, self-efficacy and listening comprehension as predictor variables. To this end, 70 English Translation students in their 8th semester selected through the convenience sampling method and they voluntarily participated in the research. To gather the data, the Persian version of the EQ questionnaire developed by Samouei (2003) and the self-efficacy questionnaire (Sherer et al., 1982) were administered. Moreover, participants sat for oral cloze and listening and memory recall exams at separate sessions. These two exercises are used to train simultaneous interpreters (Lambert, 1992). To examine their listening skill, the listening module of IELTS was also administered. The results of the multiple regression showed that %28 of variance in SI aptitude total (oral cloze+ listening and memory recall tests) was explained by the 5 predictor variables (i.e. self-efficacy, proficiency, flexibility, self-respect, stress tolerance), which could be considered as a medium to large effect size according to Cohen’s (1988) guidelines for effect size. However, separately, only proficiency was making a significant contribution to the model. The findings of the study confirmed the irrefutable importance of listening comprehension ability in simultaneous interpreting, which in turn highlighted the necessity of investigating simultaneous interpreting trainees’ listening skill at the time of attending the course.

Cohesion is a significant aspect of the Quranic language. As a matter of fact, cohesion refers to the structural-lexical relations within a text and it is a textual mechanism bringing text sentences together. Halliday’s (1976) model of cohesion was complemented by Hassan’s (1984) cohesion theory. The present study discusses and examines cohesion and cohesive devices in Surah Al-Muzzammil (the seventy-third chapter of the Qur’an) and its translation by Musavi Garmarudi. The findings suggested that all cohesive devices were employed at a non-structural level in this Surah and its translation. More specifically, lexical cohesion included reiteration, synonym, antonym, hyponymy, meronymy, equivalence and naming. Additionally, grammatical cohesion contained reference types, substitution and ellipsis. This paper also showed that there is a strong connection and cohesion among various components of the Surah and its translation, which is a basis for understanding the miracles of the Qur’an. Also, such a high degree of similarity between the source text and the target text indicated that the translator was successful in conveying the cohesive devices to the target text.