حسین وحیددستجردی

This study aimed to investigate the syntactic errors that the Iranian deaf and hearing-impaired (DHI) make in their L2 writings. To this purpose, 60 male and female Iranian DHI students with different social status were selected, through convenience sampling procedure, as participants from among the students of a deaf community in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Their general writing performance was assessed through a proficiency test (pre-test) before they received a six-week writing instruction, in which they were provided with model written utterances and common syntactic points such as sentence order, word order, subject/verb agreement, etc. At the end of the treatment, they were given two topics and asked to write short paragraphs (post-test). Then, different syntactic errors were spotted, analyzed and categorized based on Keshavarz’s linguistic taxonomy of errors. The obtained results indicated that the writing quality of the participants improved from pre-test to post-test. It was also found that majority of the participants committed more syntactic omission errors than syntactic addition errors and syntactic substitution errors. It was further found that syntactic errors in written language were not affected by the gender and social class of the participants. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence for teaching syntactic order to deaf and hearing-impaired students in order to enhance their L2 writing performance.

The importance of sport as a social, psychological, and cultural agenda in today’s world can by no means be denied. This is, as a rule, reflected in all its aspects through the language of media. The present descriptive study has thus tried to investigate how the language of sports media shape sport consumers such as coaches, players, the audience, and sporting officials at large. For this purpose, fifty soccer games were investigated during an eight-month period. The data collected from TV interviews, newspaper reports, and a sporting talk show called Navad (i.e. 90) were transcribed and analyzed with a CDA perspective in view, for the coaches, players, the audience, and officials. As a result, twelve categories were extracted based on the coaches’ reactions to their failure, from which the most salient was referees’ judgments. A close look at these categories reveal a circular relationship among sports media, coaches’ reactions to their failure or triumph, the audience interpretation of their favorite teams, and macro decisions of the officials in this field. The findings of this study can contribute to the development of a better and more appropriate environment among the four mentioned groups involved in soccer game in Iran.

Translating literary works is a difficult task, especially when it comes to cultural elements. It gets more difficult when words have ambiguities and multiple layers of meaning. The present study sought to examine the adequacy of witticism in the English renderings of Sa'di's clever remarks in Golistan (The Rose Garden). To this purpose, the researchers selected three English translations of Golistan by different translators; namely, Rehatsek (1964), Gladwin (1806), and Ross (1890). A sample of 20 anecdotes containing wittical elements were randomly taken from Golistan and compared with their English translations. The collected data were then analyzed based on Delabastita's (1993) hierarchy of pun translation strategy model. The obtained results revealed that the three translations were at best similar in terms of the applied strategies, i.e. in all the translations, the most frequently used strategies were: Pun/Non-Pun translation strategy, Non-Pun/Pun strategy, and Pun/Related Rhetorical Translation strategy, respectively. Moreover, it was indicated that all the three translations used the strategies to the same extent, though slight differences were found among them in terms of the overall use of the strategies. Since adequacy in Delabastita’ framework (1993) is hierarchically defined, it can be concluded that higher level strategies lead to more adequate translations. Generally, it was observed that the three translations were the same in terms of semantic and humorous adequacy; i.e. they transferred the source text effect in translating wittical elements of the Golistan. The findings of the study would have implications for translation students as well as translators of literary works.