Language and Translation Studies (LTS)

Abstract Translation criticism makes a great opportunity for the audience to look at translation’s quality from a new perspective. Though a comprehensive criticism is not possible sometimes, critics have always been trying to provide the audience with as much information as possible. Using Reiss’s criticism model, this research tried to examine two translations of The Handmaid’s Tale of Atwood and show the differences and similarities between the two translations. This study showed that Sommi, one of the translators, has endeavored to follow the original writer’s style. His endeavor in rendering the dialogues is suitable and cultural elements have been considered in rendering the text. Eshaghian, however, uses literal translation and this strategy have made her translation more accurate but regarding the cultural elements and the effective they may have on the reader, seems to fail.

Abstract This study draws on Genette’s theory of transtextuality to examine and categorize content-based transformations in thirteen English translations of the Rostam and Sohrab Episode, seeking to address a research gap in translation studies in this area. The findings indicate that above half of the narrative is transformed across the English translations, with the transformations falling into four main categories: “reduction,” “expansion,” “event substitution,” and “character substitution.” Reduction, the most frequent form of transformation, often weakens the epic’s causality and polyphonic structure through omitting characters, scenes, or philosophical and ethical elements. Addition, through the introduction of unprecedented narrative components, at times results in a shift in genre from heroic epic to romantic or fantasy-oriented narratives. Substitution, by altering events and characters, reconfigures key concepts such as destiny, identity, and individual responsibility. The findings suggest that English translators have rewritten the story, adapting it to the tastes and expectations of target readerships.

Abstract This paper examines the psychological defense mechanisms employed by Frank Hardy in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) as he confronts anxiety provoking memories and unresolved interpersonal conflicts. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and other analysts as systematized in Otto Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, the study applies a qualitative, text-based analysis to Frank’s monologues in Parts One and Four of the play. Focusing on defenses against instinctual drives, namely denial, repression, projection, and isolation, the analysis reveals that denial functions as Frank’s primary strategy for avoiding emotional pain, while repression shapes his fragmented recollections of family and loss. Projection and isolation appear less frequently. The study highlights the contrast between Frank’s apparent candor and his underlying psychological evasions, contributing to psychoanalytic readings of Friel’s drama.

Abstract While feminist literary criticism has extensively examined gendered perspectives in Shakespeare’s works, not much attention has been given to how disability studies might reframe such analyses through its critique of normalcy and stigma. This study places feminist criticism and disability studies in direct dialogue by examining four Shakespearean heroines—Katherina (The Taming of the Shrew), Desdemona (Othello), Hermione (The Winter’s Tale), and Portia (The Merchant of Venice). The article introduces the concept of metaphorical disability to demonstrate how gender can function as a disabling system within patriarchal structures. The heroines’ responses are examined as strategic negotiations between truth and disguise. Desdemona and Hermione choose truth and suffer exclusion, while Katherina and Portia adopt forms of performative conformity to survive. Integrating disability studies into Shakespearean analysis enables a more structurally grounded and intersectional understanding of stigma, Othering, and narrative consequence.

Abstract Although transformational leadership is recognized as one of the most effective educational leadership styles, the psychological mechanisms underlying its impact on teachers’ job performance are not fully understood. This study aimed to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and job performance, considering the mediating role of job motivation among senior high school English teachers in Golestan Province. The research was applied in purpose and descriptive-correlational in method. The statistical population consisted of 200 teachers, from whom 135 were selected using the Krejcie and Morgan table and cluster random sampling. Data were collected through standardized questionnaires on transformational leadership, job motivation, and job performance, and analyzed using structural equation modeling with SPLS software. The findings indicated that transformational leadership has a positive and significant relationship with job performance, and job motivation plays a significant mediating role in this relationship.

Abstract Self-regulated learning is a key factor in academic success, particularly in foreign language learning, and is influenced by individual and environmental factors. This study examined the relationship between perceptions of the learning environment and self-regulated learning, considering the mediating roles of academic emotions, attributional styles, and achievement goals among French language students. Using a descriptive-correlational design, structural equation modeling (SEM) through AMOS was conducted on data from 117 students at Hakim Sabzevari University, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, and the University of Tehran (M = 23.11 years). Data were collected using standardized measures of learning environment, achievement goals, academic emotions, attributional styles, and self-regulated learning. The findings showed a significant positive relationship between perceptions of the learning environment and achievement goals, whereas no significant relationships were found with academic emotions or attributional styles. These findings highlight the importance of cognitive-motivational processes in understanding self-regulated learning among French language students.

Abstract
1. Introduction
Rhetoric is a term that has significantly changed in meaning throughout the history. Not enough attention has been given to the term’s conceptual complexity in Persian and its vast meaning in literary studies. Although it is impossible to differentiate between the various meanings of the term, rhetoric in different contexts has a particular meaning. In Persian, this term has frequently been translated to oratory and eloquence; as rhetoric is more than oratory and eloquence, in this essay we have studied how different meanings of rhetoric have been shaped throughout the history. Some of the most important meanings of rhetoric are eloquence, oratory, weak style and communication. This essay can help the scholars to distinguish between the various meanings of rhetoric in different contexts and differentiate their significance in translation.
2. Methodology
Individuals trained in different fields often prefer to use rhetoric in specific contexts, while rhetoric cannot be restricted to a particular use. Considering the fact that none of its equivalents in Persian can completely demonstrate the true nature of rhetoric and also because of cultural and historical connotations, we have preferred to use the term rhetoric in this essay instead of any of its equivalents in Persian. Different meanings of rhetoric in different periods have been investigated in this essay. Obviously, the perspectives of our ancestors about rhetoric have never been forgotten completely in any time, but we can say in different historical periods, one specific meaning of rhetoric has been dominant over its other meanings.
3. Discussion
Based on historical facts, the term rhetoric was first used in one of the Plato’s dialogues known as Gorgias, which was probably written around 380 BC. Without any doubt, rhetoric in this work referred to oratory. After Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian who were the most eminent figures and biggest theoreticians of oratory in ancient times also used rhetoric in the same manner and rhetoric was long used to mean oratory. But after the democratic governments in Greece and Rome collapsed, the civic role of rhetoric gradually decreased and weakened and instead of practicing forensic and deliberative oratory, aesthetics became the concern of the teachers of rhetoric and the aesthetic topics in rhetorical handbooks became dominant, and rhetoric begin to mean eloquence. In other words eloquence is one of the several meanings of rhetoric. As soon as style became dominant over the other principles in rhetorical handbooks sophistication and attention to the decorative and imaginative aspects of language and the techniques and ways of beautifying grew among rhetoricians and they became obsessed with aesthetics. In this period the meaning of rhetoric changes to verbiage and weak style. Even today in educational institutions in the United States and other countries, rhetoric still has negative connotations. We can claim that rhetoric in its history was always fluctuated between moral and logical and aesthetical perspectives and these perspectives have imposed positive and negative meanings to this term. In the modern period, scholars believe that rhetoric is any kind of communication attempt to change or reinforce an idea, behavior or attitude of human beings. That’s why rhetoric nowadays is equal to all human communication. In other words rhetoric in its new meaning is part of human identity, because whenever man strives to express his emotions and thoughts with the aim of influencing others he is using rhetoric, so we can infer that rhetoric is omnipresent. In this new perspective rhetoric is more than oratory, eloquence and verbiage.
4. Conclusion
The term rhetoric was first used in one of the paltos dialogues known as Gorgias and has long been used to mean oratory; but due to intellectual, social and political developments in Europe the meaning of rhetoric underwent changes throughout the history and this term gradually not only referred to oratory, but also begin to mean eloquence, verbiage, weak style, persuasion and communication. Persian scholars and translators have mostly translated rhetoric to eloquence or oratory and have neglected the other meanings of rhetoric. In this essay we have analyzed how the scope of rhetoric due to political and social changes have changed throughout the history and what has rhetoric been referred to in different periods. This essay can help the scholars to distinguish the various meanings of rhetoric in literary and nonliterary studies and differentiate their significance in translation.

Abstract In spite of similarities between Iranian-Islamic rhetoric and English-European rhetoric, figures of speech, figures of expression and semantics have been the focus of the former, while the latter includes accuracy. Also, Iranian-Islamic rhetoric focuses on written rhetoric, whereases spoken rhetoric is the focus of English-European rhetoric. A comparative study of rhetoric in Persian and English, especially in the classification of figures of aesthetics, which is the main focus of this study, helps researchers analyze the aesthetic aspects of speech and enriches our knowledge of rhetoric in linguistics. This research tries to address such questions as how to classify rhetoric in Persian and English, the similarities and differences in the rhetoric classification and rhetorical aesthetics of these two languages. It follows a mixed-methods approach and the data are collected through a library survey. The findings suggest that the comparison of figures of speech in English and Persian should be done in light of semantics and figures of expression. The science of figures of speech in Persian is an independent field of study and is more extensive than English rhetoric, which is not understood as an independent field of study. Figures of speech in English are at times intertwined with figures of expression and meaning. The border of figures of speech in Persian is more distinctive than that of English.

Abstract Translator studies, as a recent subfield of Translation Studies, focuses explicitly on translators rather than translated texts since translators create texts. While translators have been studied from different cultural and cognitive perspectives, their translatorial style from sociological perspectives has been remained underexplored. Against this backdrop, this study used Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a sociological theory to study major traces of Saleh Hosseini’s habitus in his translatorial style. To this end, a corpus from samples of Moby-Dick; Or the Whale and To the Lighthouse and their Persian translations was made. To study the samples, AntConc outputs were examined at morphological, lexical, and phrasal levels. Moreover, a semi-structured interview was conducted with Saleh Hosseini to complement and validate the findings. The results indicated that several aspects of Saleh Hosseini’s translatorial style, including his tendency towards using Arabic, literary, and archaic words, together with his inclination to use a wide variety of lexical items and sequence of genitive can be accounted for by the fields he comes from; in other words, his cultural capital and his primary and secondary habitus. His fields, life experiences, and interactions with various agents have shaped his style in translation, which can be known as Saleh Hosseini’s archaic style.

Abstract
Marxism is the school based on Karl Marx’s idea on the political and economic conditions governing the world. Marx considers the economic motivations present behind all decisions in the capitalist society. The aim of this article is to analyze Marxist ideas present in Albee’s The Zoo Story, and to consider the effects of the Capitalist society on the life of the citizens that the two characters of the play represent. In The Zoo Story, Peter could be considered as the representative of the petty bourgeoisie or the middle class and Jerry as the one representing the proletariat. Marx believed that in the capitalist society the two classes are the victims of the bourgeoisie, as the latter one uses them for its goals. Peter and Jerry are the victims in the society, one through his poverty and being alienated, and the other by being interpellated and brainwashed. Althusser defines interpellation as the way that the hegemony makes the subjects believe in its ideology and consider it as their own. Althusser also introduces the sources of interpellation as the education and religion system and the media. Therefore, Peter as the one who works for the publishing company and reads books and watches the TV is at the center on interpellation. The findings of the article show that the characters are both alienated from each other and from themselves. Jerry is alienated from other people and lives in a place that resembles the zoo, and Peter is alienated from himself as he is not aware of his situation as the victim of the interpellation of the capitalist ideology.

Abstract
This study critically evaluated the newly published Iranian twelfth-grade English textbook, Vision 3, with a focus on ‘rights analysis’ and ‘culture’ adopting a mixed-methods design. To this end, 200 Iranian school English teachers and 200 twelfth-grade students were selected nation-wide from various Iranian high schools based on convenience sampling. The participants (both male and female) completed a validated 56-item researcher-made questionnaire both online and in the paper format. Moreover, 15 teachers and 15 students, whose informed consent was obtained, attended a semi-structured interview voluntarily. The participants’ rights and needs as well as the cultural aspects of the book were also analyzed subjectively by the researchers. The results of the descriptive statistics of the questionnaire and the content analysis of the interviews showed that despite the authors’ claim that the book enjoyed a mainly communicative approach in its design and preparation, the Vision 3 package has serious shortcomings, including failure to take into account the students’ needs, the negligence of the rights of the teachers and students in the process of designing and compiling the book, following a producer-consumer attitude in developing the materials, ignoring the equal distribution of power, and pursuing an extreme localization and Iranianization of the target language culture. Therefore, it is recommended that policymakers consider both teachers and students’ viewpoints to overcome these drawbacks in future editions of the book.

Abstract  The present research investigated the reports of wrestling reporters to present a specific model for translating conceptual metaphors. This study was qualitative and corpus-based. To this end, 20 reports from the World Wrestling Cup series in 2022 were randomly selected and analyzed through linguistic-based content analysis. The analysis showed that metaphors constituted more than 8% of the reports on average. Therefore, the most frequent metaphorical sentences in these reports were identified and finally, a specific context-oriented translation model for conceptual metaphors was developed for wrestling sports reports. Considering the importance of accurate translation to find the most relevant concept in the target language, and also considering that many researchers regard metaphor translation as the most challenging problem of translation, the specific context-oriented translation model for conceptual metaphors was designed and introduced for sports reports, especially wrestling.

Abstract The global spread of English resulted in a surge in the global demand for learning this lingua franca. The majority of English language teaching is conducted through global ELT coursebooks. However, the end users have continuously criticized the promotion of Western values, consolidation of linguistic imperialism, and hegemonic practices through these books. This study describes the process of developing localized English language teaching materials based on research findings and Tomlinson’s text-driven approach. The selection of suitable texts is essential for optimizing language learning through SLA principles, such as providing learners with ample opportunities for meaningful language use and directing their attention toward meaning. After development, these materials, along with their accompanying audio and video files, were uploaded to an online platform (www.chamranelt.ir) where language teachers could employ them in their classrooms. This is the most prominent characteristic of the platform, and it is argued that it can be a solution to the possible cultural problems caused by global English language teaching coursebooks. These materials are more learner-centered, more engaging, and can provide learners with numerous opportunities to develop their intercultural communicative competence. Due to their cost-effectiveness, they can be efficiently marketed.