فصلنامه مطالعات زبان و ترجمه
سال چهل و پنجم شماره 3 (پاییز 1391)

In this descriptive study by conducting four focus group interviews including undergraduate and graduate students of English translation in Iranian universities, the students’ opinions, comments and feedback on assessment approaches of their teachers were investigated. The obtained results in terms of the students’ opinions, comments, and feedback on assessment approaches were then compared and contrasted with distinguished models and approaches to translation assessment. Using the procedure of grounded theory, a method of qualitative data analysis, the focus group interviews data was coded and analyzed. The results of data analysis indicated that students believe that most of the assessment approaches advocated and applied by Iranian translator educators mostly complies with the criteria of translation quality assessment which are introduced by theorists of translation quality assessment. These approaches conform to a great extent to the approaches and models of translation quality assessment presented by translation assessment theorists.

Adopting an analytical semiotic approach to literature, the present study surveys the presence of agents and the type of their existence in the meaning formation process. We analyze Dash Akol a story by Sadegh Hedayat. The story centers on the focal character of Dash Akol and his actions in the surrounding context. In fact, in the course of the story, the agent confronts crises which make him leave or negate a former condition to attain a new one. The study mainly aims to analyze the trend of emergence and movement of the main agents in the story based on the existential semiotic theory. In existential semiotics, the agent who feels a gap leaves the Dasein (being-this) and negates the present conditions, thus moving toward an affirmative situation. The study seeks to investigate the existential function of negation and affirmation in the discourse of Dash Akol in order to explain the conditions for meaning production and passing the presence crisis. The main research question is: how do negation and affirmation as two significant discoursal elements affect the existential process of the discourse?

According to the official master’s curriculum of Translation Studies, one of the main goals of the program is to educate translators to fulfill the growing need of exchanging information with other countries. To this end, knowledge of cultural elements is one of the basic essentials. Besides linguistic features of the source and target languages, translators are supposed to be familiar with cultural features of both languages and how to render cultural elements. This paper seeks to examine whether the official curriculum of Translation Studies at MA level adequately concerns the role of culture in translation and translating. In addition, students’ viewpoints about the curriculum and their performance in translating cultural elements and idioms are explored. A content analysis of the official curriculum standards indicated that only two elective courses of "cultural elements in two languages" and "culture and sociology in translation" are offered in order to acquaint students with cultural elements. However, only two from among ten universities enquired offered one of the courses as an elective course. A total of 60 graduate students of Translation Studies took part in this study. They were divided into experimental and control groups including the students who took either of the courses and those who did not, respectively. They were administered a researcher-made qualitative questionnaire tapping into their views about cultural foci in their translation courses. The results of this phase of study revealed that cultural elements and their translation were not adequately addressed in the curriculum. The students, then, in the second phase of the study, took a translation test in an attempt to assess and compare their ability of translating cultural elements. A use was made of t-test to compare the performance of the two groups. The results indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group significantly in translating cultural elements. This suggested that sufficient attention to culture, cultural elements, and how to translate them significantly affects translation quality. In conclusion, some recommendations are made to improve the quality of cultural translation.

A great deal of translation is done in specialized areas. It is essential to analyze the components of the source text and choose the most precise equivalents for them while translating. Since corpora are collected as natural production of the linguistic community, they are considered as reliable sources for equivalents. The present study compares the advantages of corpora in the translation process with those of the conventional dictionaries. 174 English technical terms in the field of Economics were looked up in an English-Persian dictionary. The suggested equivalents were searched in a corpus of around 115000 words compiled from the economic Persian texts in a journal website. The results showed that many of the dictionary suggestions were not used in specialized texts. The frequency of the equivalents in the corpus was then found to be a reliable criterion as to the best equivalent for the technical term.

The notion of style and its function in translation literary text and texts which have literary characteristics is very important. Some theorists consider the importance of translation of literary texts to the extent that is equal to stylistic translation. One major subject relevant to style is cohesion which is regarded less in translation discussions. First, in the present research paper, the researchers made a distinction between the original text style and the translated text style and then gave a definition of cohesion in style. At the end, It investigated the translation of Quran by Hadad Adel and based on his principles, the analysis revealed that the translator could not be successful in presenting cohesion in his translation.

In recent years, computer assisted language learning (CALL) methods have been taking advantage of different types of corpora and concordancing tools in solving lexical, grammatical, stylistic, semantic, and many other different linguistic problems.This paper isan effort to demonstrate the effect of using concordances in English language classes as a tool for self-learning of certain grammatical patterns, namely, verbs and adjectives with different prepositions. Grammatical and lexical studies are among the two most frequent areas which have made use of linguistic corpora. The results reveal the high effectiveness of corpus consultation as a supplement to conventional language learning tools such as grammar textbooks, dictionaries and the like. The results also made clear that the effect of corpus on students’ self-learning increases as their level of language proficiency enhances. The total improvement of the students on using corpora has been gained as 18.4% which is promising inits own status.