Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Translation Studies

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acceptability of two Persian translations of Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by finding the position of each Persian translation in the literary polysystem of Iran. It also aimed to identify the most/least used translation strategies applied by each Persian translator, Morteza Madaninejad (2000) and Hamideh Ashkannezhand (2004), for translating culture-specific items (CSIs) from English into Persian. To do so, CSIs were extracted from the novel and classified based on Espindola and Vasconcellos's (2006) classification of cultural items. Then, Pederson's (2005) taxonomy of translation strategies was used to analyze the two Persian translations. The results indicated that Madaninejad preferred to use source oriented strategies. Thus, the translation he produced occupied the primary position in the literary polysystem. By contrast, Ashkannezhand had an interest in the use of target -oriented strategies. The findings have implications for translators of literary texts.

The main objective of the present study was to semantically and syntactically explore translation strategies applied by translators in the translation of chapter nineteen of Vandidad from Avestan to Middle Persian for ritual purposes. To this end, the Middle Persian translation of Vandidad was studied, and the meaning of the words accompanying their syntactic roles in the Avestan language were compared to their Middle Persian equivalents. Then, the strategies applied by the translators were divided into two categories: semantic and syntactic ones. The findings of the study can shed some light on the translation strategies applied in the translation of ancient texts which can be used for deeper and broader scientific inquiry into Iranian ancient languages.

The aim of this study was threefold: it aimed to develop a field-specific academic word list for accounting, to find the degree of coincidence between the word list and Coxhead's academic word list (AWL), and also to compare the occurrences of the most frequently used words in the list with six available word lists in different disciplines. A large corpus of accounting research articles was compiled and analyzed. We recognized 658 academic word families with the highest frequency in the corpus which we calledAccounting Academic Word List (AAWL ) . These 658-word families accounted for 10.16 % of the whole corpus. Further analysis indicated that out of these high-frequency word families we identified, only 354 coincided with those listed in AWL. Moreover, 50 most frequently used words in the list accounted for 3.98 % of the whole corpus. These words appeared in six available word lists in different disciplines with different degrees of occurrences which is a starting point for the development of a composite word list. Generally, this study confirmed the significance of subject-specificity of corpus-based word lists. The findings of this study suggest that AAWL can be used as a reference for the accounting community.

Sentiment analysis, as one of the text-mining techniques, has been widely used in many research areas related to public opinions. The present work seeks to examine the reception of the translations of  Louis Cha’s martial arts novels in the English and French worlds through sentiment analyses of readers’ online book reviews in popular book reviewing websites such as Amazon and Belio. The results show that the English and French versions of Louis Cha’s martial arts novels are mostly well received by readers since both English and French readers had given the highest ratings to the narrative features, plots and characterization features of the translated novels. Furthermore, between the translations in English and French, the reception level of the Anna Holmwood’s English version is higher than that of the French version by Jiann-yuh Wang. Overall, the findings of the study suggest that translations maintaining original Chinese cultural elements have been well-received in the Western community.

The widespread phenomenon of ‘retranslation’ that has become prevalent in the world refers to subsequent translations of a text or part of a text, carried out after the initial translation that introduced this text to the ‘same’ target language. Translation Studies scholars have strived to formulate hypotheses for re-translation. In 1990, Berman put forward the Retranslation Hypothesis in which he hypothesized that the earlier re-translations of a work depart from the source language and are more in line with the target language and culture over time. This hypothesis, in some cases, has been confirmed or partially confirmed, and in some others, disapproved. Thus, to confirm or reject the Retranslation Hypothesis more significantly, and push it forward to theorization, it must be (re)examined in different languages. Therefore, this study aimed to revisit the hypothesis by examining the Persian re-translations of the novel The Little Prince. The results of the study were largely in line with the hypothesis and proved that earlier translations follow more closely the norms of target language and culture, and later ones are closer to the source text and culture. The study ultimately serves as another piece of the puzzle for the Retranslation Hypothesis to approach a theory.

Research findings reported to date indicate that carefully planning speech while performing a task increases second language (L2) learners’ attention to formal aspects of their discourse. The evidence, however, is mostly based on performance analysis with respect to the linguistic measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To enhance the psycholinguistic validity of current findings, the present research adopted a process-product approach to analyze L2 learners’ performance and attention shift as indicated by the occurrence of pauses in their speech. The study involved thirty Iranian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) who were divided into two groups of fifteen. Whereas participants in the first group were given unlimited time to carefully plan while performing a narrative task, their counterparts in the other group completed the same task under time constraint. Following participants’ performance, both performance analysis and retrospective interviews were conducted to collect their protocol data. The results revealed that carefully planned speech is characterized by increased complexity and accuracy and reduced fluency stemming from attention being primarily focused on syntactic encoding, lexical choice, and phonology instead of conceptualizing the message. The outcomes are discussed in light of their theoretical and pedagogical implications.