Language and Translation Studies (LTS)

Abstract The Academy of Persian Language and Literature is the regulatory body for preserving the Persian language and its orthography, trying to protect the Persian language from fragmentation and possible related dangers. As the name implies, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is expected to focus on culture and identity as well. Notwithstanding this expectation, the goals, duties and performance of the academy suggest that its main focus is on its lexical and linguistic functions. It goes without saying that culture and language are inextricably linked; therefore, when you speak of language, you cannot overlook the role of culture. The present paper introduces the new concept of cultulinguia, meaning an arena for displaying cultulings (the culture within the language). Along with the academy, cultulinguia can play an effective role. The academy appears to have a top-down, power-oriented, prescriptive, monophonic, and word-centered approach, with a strong focus on the form of the word than meaning. Consequently, people may not be interested in using these words as they become exvolved in such words. Cultulinguia, in contrast, follows a bottom-up approach, which is people-oriented, descriptive, polyphonic and culture-oriented, meaning that all people within the society can constructively contribute to it. Additionally, cultulinguia tries to achieve the culture hidden in the language by focusing on cultulings and paves the way for cultural excellence by replacing defective cultural memes. Through this, people become more involved in cultulings and the views of the majority of people are taken into account when it comes to make a decision. This should be noted that the academy and the cultulinguia act like two wings for the linguistic and cultural excellence of the given society and they can complement each other and meaningfully contribute to linguistic and cultural planning.

Abstract Due to bilingualism and interaction among languages, all languages experience changes at different levels as a result of these language contacts. One of these levels is lexicon which has become a source of concern for policy makers and language planners more than the other language levels. Therefore, this qualitative study was conducted to investigate the plan of replacing the loanwords in high school textbooks with the proposed terms by Academy of Persian Language and Literature. To this end, in a structured interview, 126 participants, including high school students, teachers, college students, and linguists were required to evaluate the necessity of implementing the plan, justify its success or failure, and propose suggestions for increasing its efficiency. The results of this study indicated that the vast majority of participants (97%) did not agree with the implementation of the plan. The reasons they gave for their disagreement were confusion in the audience, lack of coordination in the use of proposed terms in educational settings, and the international nature of technical terms. They also deemed the plan unsuccessful justifying that the audience would not use the new terms in their daily communication and that scientific terms are international in nature. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, while diligently trying to preserve the structure of Persian as the language of science, should reformulate the quality and quantity of the plan through modifying the principles and criteria for selecting technical terms.

Abstract The Academy of Persian Language and Literature as an institute with (inter)national remit, whose policies and plans could have far-reaching consequences not only in linguistic domains but also in social and political ones, must be regularly subjected to internal and external evaluation. The resultant feedback could then contribute to its maximal efficiency. In keeping with this, and having adopted an advocacy-participatory approach, and having applied some principles and concepts from the interdisciplinary Language Policy and Planning to the mechanism involved in the performance of the institute and especially its word-formation processes, the present study has set out to not only lay bare the inadequacies inherent in its functioning but also draw more increasingly the Persian Language policy-makers' attention to them. Using qualitative documentary analysis, the researcher sought to critically, as required of an advocacy-participatory stance, examine and analyze the Academy's linear process of language policy. The findings indicate that the Academy, in its functioning, (un)consciously has assumed a positivistic and stagist standpoint likely to cause the resistance of language agents in various levels and domains of the Iranian pluralistic society. Another finding of the investigation is a lack of recognition of a conflict of interest among the various actors involved in language policy in the documentary data analyzed. Moreover, the adoption of an elitist stance, especially on the issue of word formation, has led to a lack of recognition of the native speaker's linguistic intuition as an invaluable resource for helping with the selection, use, and acceptability of neologisms in Persian.

Abstract To date, some research has been carried out on Persian neologisms from linguistics, linguistic typology or sociolinguistics perspectives; however, research from a psycholinguistic perspective offers new insights into Persian neologisms and their foreign equivalents. Employing the concept of emotioncy (emotioncy+frequency of senses), the present study compares the cultural weight of seven Persian neologisms and their foreign equivalents to discover why the public accept or reject the words, approved by the academy of Persian language and literature. Moreover, the study examines the role of their native language in the application of these words. To this end, 223 participants in the quantitative phase and 61 participants in the qualitative phase of the study were selected from the public based on convenience sampling and data saturation to participate in the study. The study follows a sequential mixed-methods design which consists of qualitative and quantitively phases to collect the relevant data. The results of the t-test show that there is a significant difference between the six pairs in terms of emotioncy. Moreover, the results of One-way ANOVA confirm that there is a significant difference in three of the selected words with respect to the native language of the speakers, including Persian, Kurdish and Turkish in terms of emotioncy. After determining the inter-rater agreement and inter-rater reliability of the data, the qualitative results reveal 16 reasons for the acceptance of the foreign equivalents, such as positive association, beautiful-sounding words and high frequency. Also, eight reasons for the non-acceptance of the Persian neologisms are identified like negative association, hard sounding words and low frequency. Indeed, to promote the acceptance and application of neologisms, the academy of Persian language and literature should take not only linguistic but also psycho-sociolinguistics issues into consideration.

Abstract The purpose of the current study was to identify features of national identity in translational and non-translational children’s literature and analyze the contribution of these texts to identity formation of Iranian children. For the purpose of this study, 16 translational and non-translational realistic young adult novels, 8 translational and 8 non-translational, that were published in Iran were scrutinized thoroughly to extract instances of national identity. The instances were extracted based on ethnic-civic categorization of national identity features which is a combination of two taxonomies of the civic and ethnic features of national identity provided by Smith (1991). The extracted instances were carefully analyzed and compared to reach a conclusion. The results of the study revealed that Iranian children’s exposure to features of non-Iranian national identity is twice the number of their exposure to features of Iranian national identity. Furthermore, only some of the aspects of national identity are introduced to children through novels. In fact, the low frequency of some elements of national identity, including economic, ideological, political and legal features, shows that the more complicated aspects of national identity are marginalized in these texts. The study showed that young adult novels have modest contribution to Iranian children’s national consciousness.

Abstract Culture–specific items or realia refer to cultural items and native concepts in different societies, which frequently pose a great difficulty for translators. Concerning the transfer of realia from the source language into the target language, it is considered a great achievement for translators to preserve much of their semantic and cultural load, not least in literary translation. The present research is based on the ideas of Sergey Vlakhov and Sider Florin, the famous Bulgarian translation theorists, who classified realia into geographic, ethnographic, sociopolitical, and military categories and proposed a number of strategies to translate them properly from one language into another. Relying on a comparative and analytical–descriptive methodology, this research studied how sociopolitical realia had been rendered in the Russian translation of Simin Daneshvar’s novel Savushun. According to the results, approximate translation–specifically the functional analogue–was found to be the most frequently used strategy while transcription, transliteration, and contextual translation had been used the least. Many cases were found in which the cultural and even semantic, linguistic, and stylistic load of the words and phrases had been lost. In general, the success of Russian translators to transfer the cultural load of sociopolitical realia in to the target text is considered relative.

Abstract Bahramshahi’s Kalīla wa-Dimna was translated into Persian through an intermediary language. However, the didactic and religious aspects of Bahramshahi’s Kalīla wa-Dimna have a strong association with the Iranian society and culture of the sixth century. This study is based on Polysystem Theory and Gideon Toury’s three-stage methodology. According to his methodology, the translation should be situated within the target culture and the themes which are common to the translation and target culture be extracted. Then, the target text segments are mapped onto the source language segments, and finally the strategies used in the translation are categorized. The findings suggested that the themes of Kalīla wa-Dimna stories (whether from a global perspective or from an Iranian or Indian perspective) are common among Asian religions and Eastern nations. These themes carry religious and moral values. In the second step, the story “The Seabird and The Sea Agent” was compared and contrasted against its counterpart “Simorgh and Gruda” in the Panchatantra. The comparative analysis suggested the two mythical birds had a similar origin. This is followed by the identification of such translation strategies as deletion, modification, replacement and enhancement in the target text. It was found that the translator used these strategies to create a balance between the source culture and the target culture. This study also showed that the target culture played a central role in Nasrollah Monshi’s translation, which assisted the translator to render culture-specific items. The translator brought the text closer to the dominant discourse by increasing the number of ideological elements in the text.