Address Terms

This study aims at ascertaining a framework that would account for the Persian data. We scrutinize all data occurring in the selected corpus, and describe how they usually work on the basis of the two following variables: power and intimacy. According to our investigation, the use of terms of address in Persian is affected by age, sex, occupation, ideology, political and social position of the interlocutors. These variables can be stated as a result of the investigation of older material – such as qualitative analysis of observations followed by unobtrusive note taking of contemporary use, a corpus of several plays, travel accounts, interviews, TV, radio and careful observation terms used to address today. The above-mentioned variables indicate a strong relationship between social structures and address terms in Persian.

This study set out to check the addressing behavior within men’s and women’s talk in the written conversations in English language textbook series titled ‘New Interchange book’ by Richards, Hull and Proctor, (1998) from Cambridge University Press. In line with this aim, the present researchers initially prepared descriptive tables for both formal and informal contexts in three theme categories (Social, Cultural & Economic) vis a vis four case appropriations (men*men, men*women, women*men, women*women). The distributions of interlocutors were coded through content analysis techniques. The major findings indicated that the highest percentage of detected address terms belonged to pronouns (67.7%). The proportions for gender appropriations between interlocutors for this address term showed that the case condition with women to men (52.3%) and men to women (36.4%) had the highest rates as compared with other cases. Then, in the final stage, the datasets were scrutinized in terms of theories on gender disparity in the instructional materials. This paper has some pedagogical implications in terms of addressing term inequality as mapped on gender status within ELT books, which might indirectly change the balance against full and rich contexts for effective learning to occur.

- This study aimed at investigating the translation of address terms from Arabic text of the Quran (ST) into English as well as Persian translations (TTs) based on politeness principle. The purpose was to evaluate the two translations in terms of implementing proper polite address terms. The data were gathered from the Original Arabic version of the Quran as the ST and two different versions of its English translations (Gharib and Yusuf Ali) as well as two versions of Persian translations (Fooladvand and Makarem Shirazi) as the TTs.  In order to analyze the data, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness was used. The most frequent translation strategies were also identified according to Vinay and Darbelnet (2012) as well as Harvey and Higgins (1986) for rendering proper nouns. Moreover, the classification of address terms by Aliakbari&Tohi (2008) and address functions by Biber et al (1999) was also applied. To achieve the objectives, the following steps were taken: address terms were extracted from Arabic, English and Persian texts of the Quran. Then, they were classified to different types, after that politeness principles used in the Arabic text of the Quran and their rendering were compared and contrasted, and finally translation strategies applied to render Arabic address terms into English and Persian were identified. The results of the study revealed that all versions of English and Persian translations depicted the psychological distance between Allah and people as the Arabic version of the Quran. Also, the findings showed that in the translation of address terms from SL into TTs translators did their best to maintain the words of Allah by rendering the words literally.