Translation and Interpreting Research

The present study investigates the impact of English language hegemony on the different industries in Iranian context. A sample of eighty food, health, and beauty products was selected to examine the prevalence of English on product labels. Data were collected on label content, including legal requirements of labeling, statements, claims, and nutritional information, both in Persian and their corresponding English translations. Statistical analysis revealed that although both producers and consumers of these products were Persian speakers and there was no legal requirement to translate the labels, approximately 75 percent of the labels featured English translations. This finding suggests that translation serves as a linguistic tool that reinforces language hegemony within the industry. Despite the absence of legal mandates, English operates as a symbolic tool, potentially enhancing product appeal through its association with success and high quality. This study contributes to understanding industrial contexts by illuminating the complex interplay between language, power, and commerce. Additionally, it highlights the need for further examination of the socio-cultural implications of English language hegemony in non-Anglophone countries, offering valuable insights for policymakers, industry professionals, and scholars in translation studies and cultural studies.

Focusing on the intersection of translation and activism, the current study aimed to address the issue of publishers’ activist agency in the socio-political context of post-revolutionary Iran. In so doing, it mainly drew on Tymoczko’s (2010a) conceptualization of political and ideological agency and activism as engagement and her classification of its different forms. The data came from a body of publishers’ notes, written on Persian translations of six English books selected through criterion sampling from the works that apparently enjoyed a level of prestige among the international readers , and reflected the Other’s views on religious, philosophical, political, and socio-cultural issues, which considering the fundamental values of the Islamic Republic of Iran that the post-revolutionary State tries to keep, could make them a possible site of translational activism. The results showed that in their notes the publishers had encoded their engagement by using a combination of different forms of engagement, i.e., publicizing, witnessing, rousing, inspiring, and mobilizing; they also revealed their interest in introducing the unfamiliar territory of the foreign to the Persian-speaking readers, and in increasing their understanding of the Other’s culture. They emphasized the importance of tolerance, pluralism, openness, and mutual respect in cultural exchanges but introduced the source Islamic culture and its set of moral values as criteria for determining the validity of the Other’s presented ideas and beliefs and rejecting what did not meet such criteria.

In today’s vast digital landscape, where the online world knows no bounds, website localization has emerged as a critical imperative for companies worldwide to effectively promote and sell their products. However, the evaluation of website localization quality in Persian remains an underexplored domain. This study aims to fill this gap by providing insights into the assessment of localization within the Iranian context while considering the global context as well. To do so, this investigation examined Sumsung’s website localization quality, incorporating Gutiérrez-Artacho and Olvera-Lobo’s (2017) indicators, as well as additional criteria such as website usability and cultural adaptation. The findings revealed that due to the complex and time-consuming nature of the localization process, Samsung has adopted a strategic approach that can be described as globalization or reverse localization, rather than a comprehensive culturalization approach commonly discussed in translation studies. By neutralizing its content, Samsung has effectively navigated the challenges posed by the cost and resources required for localization. This strategic decision allows Samsung to maintain a consistent and inclusive brand image across different markets. This study contributes to the field of translation studies in terms of reality-based theorizing by shedding light on the localization practices of a prominent multinational company. Finally, the findings offer valuable insights for companies seeking to enhance their website localization strategies and effectively engage with diverse users in an increasingly globalized world.

During the first decades of the 20th century, Iran underwent a transformative phase spurred by the emergence of local periodicals. Intellectuals and modernists in the country, drawing inspiration from the social and cultural developments in Europe, actively engaged in defining and supervising cultural and artistic modernism in Iran. One such influential journal was Irânšahr, which, much like its foreign counterparts, sought to mirror the progress and advances in the European world. Irânšahr set itself apart by initiating a literary competition to deepen its engagement with European literature. This competition invited Iranian authors to create new literary works based on extracts from Western literary pieces. This article specifically analyzes a publication resulting from this initiative, namely “Qalb-e mâdar”, a poem by Iraj Mirza, recognized as one of his best creations. Our analysis commences with a detailed examination of Iraj’s poem and the foreign sources that inspired it. Subsequently, we conduct a comparative study between the two texts. The objective is to uncover how the Iranian poet, Iraj Mirza, not only drew inspiration from Western literature but also managed to recreate the text in a way that seamlessly aligned with the poetic and cultural conventions of the Iranian language. This exploration aims to shed light on the processes through which the Iranian poet skillfully adapted the text to cater to the preferences of his Iranian readers. However, it is essential to approach this assessment with caution. While acknowledging the prowess of the Iranian poet in adapting foreign influences, deeming his work a universal model for literary modernization may pose challenges.

In this research, the quality of the Persian translation of a computer textbook was assessed based on House’s model of Translation Quality Assessment (TQA). To achieve reliable results, the two aspects of repeatability and reproducibility were considered. To ensure repeatability, researchers assessed the translation quality of randomly selected excerpts. After two weeks, excerpts were reassessed to ensure no differences were in the frequencies and kinds of detecting mismatches. Regarding reproducibility, four raters were asked to assess the translation quality of excerpts to ensure no differences were noted between the reported results by the researchers and raters. Moreover, the inter-rater reliability of the researchers and raters was measured. The chi-square test was used to measure the differences between expected and observed errors as well. Both theoretical and statistical analyses emphasize that the quality of the Persian translation is low; furthermore, it was translated overtly rather than covertly.

By employing insights from the theory of intertextuality (Bakhtin, 1981; Kristeva, 1980; Popovic 1990) and Farhazad’s Model (2009), this research seeks to shed light on how a versified translation of a poem stands in intertextual relationship with other poems. Through a case study of the translation of “The Solitary Reaper” into Azerbaijani Turkish, the study aims to explore how the Turkish versified translation of this poem stands in intertextual relationship with other poems explicitly and implicitly. The results showed that the author’s Turkish translation of “The Solitary Reaper” stands in an intertextual relationship with Turkish poetry of Shahriar, Zelimkhan Yaqub, Aliagha Vahid, Rowshan Zamir, Seyyed Azim Shairvani and Persian poetry of Shahriar on the one hand and English poem of Wordsworth on the other hand in terms of content and genre. Moreover, the translation of “The Solitary Reaper” is not the English ballad reproduced in Turkish, but a ghazal that quotes from and refers to Wordsworth’s ballad intertextually. In the second attempt, some translations from and into Persian and Azerbaijani Turkish are provided to carry out a crosslinguistic analysis. The results of the paper showed that the themes of poems play a key role in translation. Religious or political poems need different strategies to convey the associated themes. For instance, in the religious poem examined in this study, using loan words to convey the religious themes properly is one of the strategies used by the translator while in the political poem of Ashraf, transferring the harsh tonality of the Turkish poem into Persian is the strategy applied by the translator through phonological transfer to show the political context of the poem in the poet’s revolutionary era.