فصلنامه مطالعات زبان و ترجمه
سال چهل و چهارم شماره 3 (پاییز 1390)

This study aims to evaluate while comparing and contrasting two series of textbooks for teaching English in the light of Mediated Learning Experience (MLE). The two textbook series under study were Interchange (third edition), used in most Iranian English Institutes, and the formal course book of teaching English at Iranian high schools, prescribed by the Ministry of Education. First, considering language skills, functions and purposes, the researchers evaluated similar randomly selected activities and tasks from each series of textbooks with reference to 12 criteria features derived from the Feuerstein’s MLE. Second, two questionnaires were designed in Persian to check whether the proposed characteristics of Feuerestein’s mediation about the selected activities of the textbooks were really observed by learners and teachers. The questionnaires contained a number of items concerning beliefs and affects toward each item. Third, some teachers and selected learners were interviewed to give more explanation about the selected tasks and also their general view about the activities in the two series of textbooks. The Questionnaire and interview findings were in agreement with the evaluations the researchers made on each task in the light of MLE. Finally, the researchers scrutinized the two series of textbooks against each of the features in the criteria with regard to the learners and teachers interviews.

The notion of translation and its function in the society is increasingly extending and, therefore, training competent translators demands a systematic methodology. Curricula of translation training courses are usually designed based on a conception of translation competencies. The present paper is aimed at evaluating the curriculum of the BA programme of English translation in Iran and its underlying conception of translation competencies. In so doing, first, the model of translation competencies implied by the curriculum is described and, then, it is compared with Dorothy Kelly’s model (2005) which is more appropriate for curriculum design in comparison to other models. The model of the curriculum is composed of communicative competence, comparison/transfer competence, socio-cultural competence, subject area competence, as well as research/learning competence. These overlap to some extent with Kelly’s model, while, on the other hand, there are three important competences in Kelly’s model that do not exist in that of the curriculum, namely, professional and instrumental competence, interpersonal competence, and attitudinal competence. Based on these differences, several new courses and a number of changes are necessary for the optimisation of the curriculum.

Teaching English in public schools in Iran lasts 10 hours a week in junior high schools and 11 unit credits at high schools. Numerous research studies investigating English teaching in the public education system have unanimously confirmed inadequacy of public schools. This study investigated factors behind inefficiency of English language teaching in Iranian public educational system and made a comparison between public schools and private language institutes. As a descriptive study, the research sample included 270 junior and senior high school male and female English teachers, who were selected through a cluster sampling. Meanwhile, teaching methods of 64 English teachers from private institutes and public schools were observed. Moreover, language learning standards of 32 private institutes and 32 public schools were accounted for through a questionnaire. The Cronbach alpha for the questionnaires was 0.91 and 0.85, and 0.90 for the checklist. The results of one sample t-test indicated that curriculum content, use of technology, teacher interest, sociocultural factors, teacher training, students’ cooperation, student-teacher interaction, classroom management, teaching methods, evaluation, teaching skills, and lack of extracurricular activities had different effects on the inefficiency of teaching English at public educational system. The analysis of the t-test of classroom observation through the checklist showed that there was significant difference as to classroom context, teacher motivation, using realia, students’ factors and the methods of evaluation between these two groups, although the study did not find a significant discrepancy between private language institutes and public schools as far as teachers’ proficiencies were concerned. The findings of this study are very insightful in helping policy makers and EFL teachers in public schools to make a constructive transition towards implementing the English teaching criteria that are well honored in private language institutes.

In literature, commitment has motivated many of literary men and has caused them to react in different ways. A kind of commitment associatedwith social problems which has come to be known as social commitment has found a special standing among some of the authors. This kind of commitment that deals with the author’s responsibility to focus on people’s problems and express their sufferings and inspirations has been reflected in some of the works by Victor Hugo, the great 19th century French author. He describes the life situation of the people in the French community in most of his poetry and prose works and never fails to explain their problems and sufferings. In the present research paper, we have studied social commitment in one of his great works entitled “Tale of Centuries”, a work the major part of which has been allocated to people’s lives and the elaboration of their pains and sufferings.

Considering the importance of style in corpus studies, the present article investigates one of the quantitative aspects of style, namely type-token. The questions of the translation style and translator style have been the subject of many recent studies, but the question of translators’ style has not been addressed so far. The present study is an attempt to fill the gap. To this end, three Persian translations of Khalil Jebran’s The Prophet and one English translation of Al-Ahmad’s Gharb Zadegi were selected and a contrastive analysis was conducted to reveal the changes occurring through the process of translation. The hypothesis was that type-token ratio in the target text is less than that in the source text. The contrastive analysis of the ST and the TT, followed by the Chi-square test, revealed that there was no significant difference between type- token ratio between the ST and the TT. But typetoken ratio in the English translation of Gharb Zadegi was less than that in the source text. As a result, it seems that the concise style of Gharb Zadegi has been transferred into a more wordy style.

This research was done to investigate to what extent the translations by a translator are faithful to the original work. For this purpose, the translations by Ghassem Roubin of Marguerite Duras’ works were selected. The research was conducted in terms of Antoine Berman’s method of ‘pour une critique de la traduction: John Donne’ as well as the first seven orientations presented in ‘la traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge au lointain’. The study shows that faithfulness to an author does not necessarily lead to a better translation. So, it depends, more than anything else, on the translator, because the translations, certainly the literary ones require very extensive studies especially in the domain of the author’s stylistic particularities and the translators who do not study as profoundly as required cannot be successful translators of literary works.