فیروزه محمدی حسن آبادی

The aim of intercultural translation is to communicate. Communication is acted via verbal as well as visual means. The interaction of verbal and visual means of communication makes a set of complex situations which demand special attention in translation. One context in which the interaction of visual and verbal elements gets vital importance is children’s picture books. Color is an integral part of children's books and a visual mode of communication. For the translator, to interpret symbolic colors, cultural knowledge of the source and the target cultures is required. To see how the cultural meaning of colors can be transferred and how the interrelationship of words and colors can be achieved, Nida and De Waard’s (1986) Adaptation Theory was utilized in this study. The theory was applied to eight children’s colored picture books aimed for school-aged children. Six of the books were originally written in English and translated into Persian and two of them were the other way round. The analysis of the data showed that the required features of the above-stated theory was rarely followed by translators and illustrators, and, except in one case, color symbolism was not considered by them. Findings of the study indicate that since visuals are inseparable elements of translating children's picture books, translators/illustrators should be dressed with enough information of visual-cultural aspects of translation in general, and of color symbolism in particular.

The changing culture toward multimodality enforces acquiring visual literacy in every aspect of today’s modern life. One of the fields intermingled with using various modes in different variations is language teaching and learning, especially for and by young learners. Young language learners’ (5-12 years old) lack of world experience forces them to make the most use of non-verbal modes of communication to receive and send the intended message, enhanced in foreign language learning environment. As a result, the language teacher him/herself will be supposed to be armed with visual literacy of this new language and to have the ability to successfully transmit this knowledge to the students. The present study aims to investigate whether the three focused factors in educational semiotics; namely, Process of abduction, Principle of kinesics, and Proxemics- proposed by Sert (2006) exist in the curriculum of Iranian pre-service language teachers in one of the educational districts in Isfahan. By distributing two questionnaires among TTC course instructors and pre-service teachers, and obtaining the percentage of the analyzed data, the findings showed that the number of institutes which focus on the matter are rare. Also, it was revealed that the pre-service teachers, majoring in English Language, performed better in terms of realizing the meaning of body language units and comparing and contrasting them (principle of abduction). The results will be useful for future teachers and their educational curriculum in favor of enhancing the fifth language skill, foreign language visual literacy.