فصلنامه مطالعات زبان و ترجمه
سال چهل و چهارم شماره 1 (بهار 1390)

After over one hundred and sixty years, when Fitzgerald published his first English translation of Khayyam’s quatrains, not only does his beautiful literary text still seem pleasant and fresh, still being studied and evaluated by translation scholars and literary critics, but also it has been able to marginalize later contenders as translators of Khayyam’s quatrains into English. As evidence, one may mention what was asserted in the 1920s by Saeed Nafisi, the famous Iranian scholar, that by 1925, Fitzgerald’s rendering of the Rubaiyat had been published 139 times. Although Fitzgerald’s work has so far been praised by both literary figures and translation scholars, if one considers the text from the angle of ‘faithfulness’, one notices that his text may be challenged as far as the ‘domain of discourse’ and ‘ideology’ are concerned. To put it another way, like any other translation, Fitzgerald’s rendering of the Rubaiyat has also been influenced by the translator’s ideological orientations by altering the source text’s domain of discourse. In this article, on the basis of the comments made by the translator himself about his rendering, what has been stated by translation critics, and the analysis and comparison of a couple of sample quatrains, the researcher has investigated Fitzgerald’s rendering from an ideological and domesticating point of view.

During the 1980s, scholars started to describe speech acts as they were manifested in speech. Using various methods including observation of naturally-occurring speech, open-ended or multiple-choice questionnaires, dialogue completion tasks, role plays, interviews, and protocol analyses, they managed to detect some pragmatic gaps between two different languages that sometimes lead to miscommunication (Yuan, 2001). In this study, the researchers have tried to investigate the common patterns of complimenting behavior among adult Persian speakers in Iran; this would include the topics, and functions of compliments in Persian with regard to the gender and status of the interlocutors. By choosing the method of the observation of natural speech, the researchers have tried to get instances of every-day compliments exchanged among Persian native speakers. Moreover, the results of this observation are compared with the results of several observations in the United States and New Zealand. The comparisons would help us identify some of those cross-cultural differences in the realization of compliments, as well as the demographic features of the compliment givers and receivers.

There is a strange similarity between Iqbal and R.W. Emerson, one from the Middle East, Muslim and totally familiar with western culture; the other from America, a pious minister under the influence of eastern philosophy. The concept of self-reliance is something that these two figures concentrate on and talk about as a source of light within every single human being that sheds light on human’s latent aptitudes and shows them the truth. Besides, both of them talk about solitude as a vehicle by which people can explore, detect and understand this inner self (ego) and the thing that helps people avoid imitation. This analysis is done to delineate the common attributes of Iqbal and Emerson and to clarify the importance of self-reliance in their literary works: “The Secrets of ego” by the former and “On self-reliance” by the latter.

Cross-linguistic interference is a major difficulty which Persian learners encounter in the process of foreign language learning. Addressing this interference and its negative impact at an earlier stage is both a challenge and target for the teacher. This study aims at analyzing the frequent errors made by Persian learners in different tenses in French. The analysis of the errors, the comparison of the speculations of the cause of errors, and the results of interviews with the learners showed that the learners made two kinds of errors: intralingual and interlingual. Intralingual errors occurred in generalizing the grammatical rules of le futur simple. The analysis of the interlingual errors revealed that learners’ first language (Farsi) was the main reason and the English language was the less important reason for errors in the usage of past tenses. Furthermore, learners’ first language (Farsi) turned out to be the only cause for errors when using present tenses.

It has been tried in this paper to linguistically evaluate semantic and structural characteristics of some special expressions of the language normally referred to as allegory, apothegm, idioms, proverbs, hermeneutics, metonymies and similar expressions, normally studied from different literary, anthropological, cultural, and folkloric viewpoints in a branch of linguistics entitled as phraseology in Russian and, to some extent, in Western linguistics. Later in the paper, the Persian term عبارت شناسي (ebaratshenasi) has been suggested as an equivalent to the term phraseology and the reasons for this choice have been explained. The paper also criticizes what has been presented in Russian language curriculum in Iranian universities under the subject title of "Hermeneutics & Expressions" and suggests that the title change to phraseology. The ultimate goal in the paper is to open a new door to find an answer to the following fundamental question: What is the accurate Persian equivalent of phraseologie in both French and German, and фразеология in Russian?

The translation process in audiovisual media has diverse aspects and applies different methods depending on the nature of the programs and the objectives of the producers. The present study deals with the problems in the translation of humorous expressions in English subtitles of comic series in Iranian networks. The procedure is composed of extracting humorous sentences and phrases and analyzing the way they have been expressed in subtitles. To this end, 135 comic sentences and phrases were collected out of two TV series and the methods applied in translation were analyzed based on Newmark’s classification (1998). The frequency of each method was calculated and the translators’ success in the creation of humor was analyzed. The results indicated that “paraphrasing” was the most frequently applied method in subtitled translations while it is the least successful way in rendering humor especially the verbal humor. Accordingly, the translators have often been incapable of creating the original comic sense which is mostly based on humorous accent or mispronunciation of some words and expressions. This has resulted in a work totally devoid of any real humor.

The hybrid quality of a text can be the result of its being produced in an in-between space such as a diaspora. The present study examines the hybrid character of a number of texts which are labeled as immigrant literature and compares them with texts produced in Iran (homeland) in order to find out whether hybridity is specific to texts produced in diaspora or it can also be found in texts produced in homeland. The comparison is carried out using a model of hybridity which classifies manifestations of hybridness under three main approaches to hybridization. The results of the analysis illustrated that hybridity is not a quality peculiar to diasporic texts and texts developed in homeland can be hybrid too. This necessitated the rethinking of the definition of diaspora. Moreover, this study showed that the context of text production is merely one of the factors accounting for the hybridness of a text; other factors can be the particular intention of the writer or translator or the description of a hybrid community.

The present paper reports a study carried out to examine the process of selection of foreign novels and short stories for translation and the method(s) applied in their translation into Persian during the Iran-Iraq war in Iran. The results showed that in the hard times of the war, translation performed two opposite functions. One was to resist the importation of new forms and foreign values, which might have been conceived as insecure, in translation of novels through domestication, retranslation and reprint of old material, and the other was to mediate such importation and introduce the new and the foreign, particularly in translation of short stories in literary journals.