Journal of Language and Translation
Volume:9 Issue: 2, Summer 2019

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) could be seen as a theory in qualitative more than in qualitative stud- ies. This might have led to difficulty in doing CDA. Accordingly, this study attempted to develop a quan- titative profile in the form of an analytic rubric. For this purpose, Fairclough’s model of CDA was select- ed as the research framework. The techniques used for structuring analytic scales were used over three steps. First, the criteria corresponding to text, context, and text-context interaction were identified as ide- ology, intertextuality, date, power, contextual clues, background knowledge, and culture. The next step involved validating the extracted criteria through Item-Objective Congruence Index. The final step in- cluded scaling via specifying an even number of qualities for each item accompanied by a range of scores. Then, the rubric was checked for reliability. The results of the correlation analysis revealed that the scale is reliable across different raters. The results of the present study might have educational impli- cation for CDA-oriented reading attempts. Moreover, it could open a turning point, since previous efforts to do CDA have been extremely qualitative.

This study was an attempt to provide a comprehensive model for summary writing based on the model of Van Dijk’s concept of macrostructures. The effectiveness of the model was examined in a genre-based quasi-experimental study with the data collection procedure lasting a semester. The participants included 60 female English learners divided into two experimental and control groups. The results of the study revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the posttest which was mainly due to the potential role the treatment had in increasing the learners’ structural awareness in order to help them find the most important parts of the texts, i.e. those relating to the main idea of the text and disregard the less relevant ones. The results of this study contributed to the understanding of the genre-based model and that English learners could get the essence of a given text by only understanding the gist and comprehending some sentences in a text. English learners could realize that all of the words and sentences in a text have a responsibility of conveying a particular message and that there is no need to memorize or remember every individual information in a text.

Intersemiotic translation, which can happen in the process of the translation of drama for theatre, can turn more complicated when the verbal sign system of drama has already undergone interlingual translation. The purpose of this study is to find the intersemiotic changes of translation from page to stage and to show the changes of indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs in the process of intersemiotic translation of the already interlingually translated verbal signs. In this regard, Shakespeareʼs Macbeth (1606) and its theatrical performance directed by Reza Servati (2010) were selected as the corpus and Peirceʼs model was chosen as the theoretical framework. The findings of this research demonstrate that all levels of iconical, indexical, and symbolic signs are applicable to the semiotic analysis of the performance. However, there should be a cautious generalization regarding the transfer of iconic signs. The theoretical model of this study can be used to study verbal sign variations of other literary works and other literary genres once they are intersemiotically translated to and adapted for other sign systems such as audio (like  music), visual (like painting), and audio-visual (like film).

The significant role of needs analysis in enriching the design and content of ESP course books could be in no way ignored. The present study based on a three-year longitudinal needs analysis study of medical students, a medical ESP course book was developed and approved by experts. The feedback of the four-semester practice of the approved book revealed that practitioners showed great interest in the translation notion of the course book, hence considering the cultural turn in translation studies, the researchers opted to compare the satisfaction level of the medical students once they received a translation-focused instruction based on transliteration strategy. Thus two samples of 74 and 67 medical students were randomly selected by the Training Department at Islamic Azad University, Tehran Medical Sciences and through a quantitative approach; an accredited needs-analysis questionnaire was utilized to ascertain the needs, desires and satisfaction of the medical students. Comparing both groups’ needs and satisfaction questionnaire results revealed that the transliteration-focused group displayed a higher level of satisfaction and fulfilment during the ESP course. The study suggests that manipulative transliteration is the pivoting factor in empowering teachers, prosperous students, materials developers, and stakeholders as the truly involved practitioners of medical ESP courses.

In this two-stage empirical research, the authors attempted to study the impact of promoting translation sub-competences defined by PACTE's Multi-Componential Model for Translation Competence on the promotion of total translation competence as the first stage. The experiment for this purpose was conducted on a group of Iranian undergraduate students comprising of their exposure to a targeted syllabus for one semester. A pre-test and post-test of the experiment assessed their level and progress regarding translation competence, using Orozco's measuring instruments and Farahzad and Famil Khalili's TQA scale. The first stage also investigated whether Orozco’s model could assess sub-competences separately. The second stage investigated whether translation sub-competences played equal roles within the translation competence, in order to establish a ranking of influence among them. Thus, the study contrasted the instrumental results of the tests to the total scores through the TQA scale and calculated the correlation between them. The analyses revealed that the growth in each translation sub-competence promoted the total translation competence. However, the study found Orozco’s model unable to assess translation sub-competences separately. Finally, the study found that Orozco's measuring instruments and Farahzad and Famil Khalili's TQA scale employed for this experiment were unable to collect sufficient evidential data as to measure the separate role or influence of each sub-competence in the construction of total translation competence.

The current study presents findings from a mixed-methods study of investigating the self-regulatory role of private speech (self-talk) on students’ translation quality. The aim of the study was to validate the adapted version of a self-verbalization questionnaire. The construct validity and reliability of the scale were supported by the CFA which revealed that all items reached the acceptable fit thresholds and had high reliability. The study utilized two phases of analysis. In the quantitative analysis, 151 undergraduate English translation students participated in this study. Two questionnaires including validated self-verbalization scale and self-regulation accompanying a text were distributed among the students to determine the influence of the self-regulatory role of private speech on translation quality.  The results demonstrated that the students who used more private speech had a better translation quality that shows the self-guidance role of private speech. In the qualitative phase of the study, 21 English translation students attended an interview. The focus of the interview was on the potential functions of the self-regulatory role of private speech in translation. The results indicated that most students apply private speech as a facilitator of the difficult task. Retention and evaluation were also among the most often applied strategies by the students.

Researchers have extensively compared different L2 learning contexts, such as EFL versus study-abroad, for their impacts on oral production; however, scant attention, if any, has been paid to comparing EFL settings in terms of input factors such as textbooks, amount of contacts in L2, and teachers. Accordingly, the effects of these factors on the oral production skills were investigated in this study. To this end, in a longitudinal study that spanned nearly three months, speech samples were elicited from three groups of Persian speaking advanced learners of English (N = 72) through oral narrative tasks and were scored for complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). A one-way MANOVA was used to compare the means. The average number of subordinate clauses per AS-unit was used to measure grammatical complexity, “D” was a measure of lexical complexity, the percentage of error-free clauses was an index of accuracy, and the number of dysfluencies was calculated to be an indicator of fluency. After a period of time, the results provided strong evidence for the significantly different rates of progress among the learners of the three EFL settings on lexical complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Evaluation of course materials, amount of learners’ contact in L2, and teachers’ self-efficacy revealed that these different rates of progress might well be attributed to the characteristics of the speaking tasks in the textbooks. One important implication is that gains in a special dimension of oral production can be produced if EFL curriculum developers provide target learners with speaking tasks bearing particular features.

The purpose of this study is to look into post-Greimasian semiotics and investigate how this tensive model can be applied to Rustam and Sohrab in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and its translation by Arnold. The tensive model, considering the two dimensions of intensity and extent, investigates meaning formation and production. Accordingly, this research intends to analyze the semiotic patterns in the two poems and see whether Arnold’s translation follows the same pattern as the source text. There are four elementary plus canonical models defined for the tensive model. Since in Arnold’s version of Rustam and Sohrab, some parts of the source text do not exist (although the main topic is followed), only those common parts in meaning were selected and the tensive model was applied to the discourses. Arnold followed the Greek style in his poems that considered mostly the impression derived from the poem and regarded the whole poem and not the isolated parts. In Rustam and Sohrab, Arnold shows this Greek style remarkably. The results of this study demonstrate that the discourses in the two poems mostly follow the tensive model which shows more affection, sensation, emotion, and tension. Furthermore, Arnold’s translation follow the same semiotic patterns as Ferdowsi’s Rustam and Sohrab in most cases.

This study investigated how the main linguistic traits of stream of consciousness novels are realized in Persian translations and also the frequency of translation strategies used by translators. Accordingly, a restricted set of linguistic parameters which Totò (2014) asserts can show the stream of thought of character(s), is chosen including punctuation, exclamatory utterances, interjections, and lexical repetitions. The corpus of the study is composed of 288 pages drawn from two famous stream of consciousness novels and their corresponding Persian translations: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and its translations by Darioush (1993),Keyhan (2008) and Taheri (2009) and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its translations by Darioush (1991 ), Badiee (2001), and Alijanpour (2015). Also, to classify the translational choices regarding each linguistic element, Delabastita (1993)’s classification of translational strategies was used. The final results indicated that despite certain losses of linguistic features caused by omissions or other linguistic choices (such as using non-identical translations in the case of lexical-repetition translation), all five translators have successfully conveyed at least more than half of the mentioned features in their translations.

This study was an attempt to scrutinize the impact of the Critical Appraisal of Published Research (CAPR) in undergraduate teacher training programs on EFL teachers’ Quantitative Research Literacy (QRL). To meet this objective, 30 male and female ELT teachers were non-randomly selected and randomly assigned to two groups. In two research classes, the experimental group received the CAPR, whereas the control group received conventional teacher-centered instruction with summative assessment. The QRL questionnaire was employed as the pretest and posttest. After ensuring the pre-treatment homogeneity of the participants in terms of QRL, analyzing the post-treatment data through running an independent-samples t-test indicated that there was a significant difference in post-treatment QRL scores between the participants in the experimental group and the control group. In other words, the CAPR had a significantly better impact on EFL teachers’ QRL.