Communicative Aspects of APLL Neologized Equivalents of English IT Terms

Equivalents which are proposed by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL) have always been challenging and sources of controversy among experts and researchers. The greatest concerns were about the forms or morphology of APLL terms. Information Technology (IT) has a wide range of terminology which is brought about by the internet and digital devices. In Iran, APLL tried to coin equivalents to these terms. These terms acceptance and communicative aspects were problematic. Therefore, this survey research aimed at the evaluation of communicative aspects of APLL equivalents based on models of Picht and Draskau, (1985) and De Beaugrande and Dressler (1992). For this purpose, first, the researcher synthesized these models into nine statements and then selected the fifty most widespread equivalents and their English originals and converted them into a static questionnaire in Google Forms. After the formation of the questionnaire, its link was created and sent to three hundred and sixty IT users and experts. Of them, 106 people visited the questionnaires and marked the statements. The questionnaire statements were analyzed in terms of frequencies and percentages of answers to the statements. The analysis indicated two types of respondents: those who were in favor of APLL equivalents and those who were against them. Then the researcher converted the frequencies into descriptive statistics. However, it was found that the group in favor of the APLL neologisms (Mean= 35) reported that they are appealing, consistent with Persian rules of morphology, socially accepted, semantically justifiable, genre-related, concise, and expected. On the other hand, the other group which was against the APLL equivalents to IT terms (Mean=70.55) reported that such terms are not consistent with Persian rules of morphology, socially accepted, semantically justifiable, genre-related, concise, and expected. Moreover, the group against the APLL equivalents outperformed the group in favor of such equivalents. In addition, the analysis of the significance level of the relationship between the two groups through a t-test indicated that since p < 0.0001, the difference between the two groups was statistically significant. The study has implications for teachers, students, and researchers in language teaching, translation studies, and linguistics.