International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation
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On Trainee Interpreters’ English Listening Comprehension Barriers: The Case of Local University Undergraduate Translation Majors in China
Get PDFListening is the first step of interpretation, and it determines whether an interpreter can successfully grasp information received in the source utterance and fulfill the interpreting task. Being an important part of interpreting process, it is also the bottleneck of many trainee interpreters. For the majority of Chinese students majoring in English or translation, it is a problem needing to be addressed urgently. The present study aims at finding the trainees’ barriers for listening comprehension in English to Chinese interpretation. A questionnaire study was conducted on 164 trainee interpreters. The results and the following informal interviews indicate that some factors exert negative effects on the trainees’ listening and information receiving, including linguistic barriers and non-linguistic ones. The linguistic barriers revealed from the data are perception of sounds, lexical segmentation, sentence structure recognition etc. The Non-linguistic barriers include lack of background knowledge, logic organization of the information, speaker’s accent, unfamiliar vocabularies, unbalanced effort coordination and psychological stress, etc. Based on the theoretical and pedagogic analysis of students’ problems, some teaching and training strategies are suggested to cope with the problems
A Corpus-based Study on Adverbs of Degree in C-E Translation of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China
Get PDFAdverbs play an important role in the language on account of their variety in usage, flexibility in position, and diversity of meanings in different contexts. Considering the inherent distinctions between Chinese and English, the translation of adverbs is critical to representing the idea clearly and smoothly. The paper intends to investigate the adverbial translation of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China through the corpus-based methods, examining normalization in translating Chinese adverbs of degree. Using corpus software and Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator, the author conducts a research on adverbs of degree in both the comparable corpus and parallel corpus. As a result, the paper finds that weakening instead of normalization is the tendency in translation of adverbs of degree, whether from the perspective of the comparable corpus or the parallel corpus. The translated texts of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China turn out to have fewer adverbs of degree in terms of frequency, compared to the original English corpus. And it can be seen that adverbs of degree are omitted or expressed in another way rather than directly translated from Chinese to English. Motivations are found to be semantic degradation of adverbs of degree, ambiguity of meaning of adverbs of degree, and habitual way of expression. Hopefully, the study will shed some light on the further corpus-based research or translation of political texts in the future
Translating Technology and Culture: Analysis of Translation of Non-literary Chinese Texts in Science and Civilisation in China
Get PDFScience and Civilisation in China is needless to say important for understanding and studying China and its technology and culture, but the translation of those technical terms and books has been little systematically discussed. The study, through a self-collected bilingual corpus of culture-loaded texts in those volumes, describes the translation features and explains the translation effects brought by the series of Science and Civilisation in China. It finds out that the book editors tried to keep a balance between literal and free translation by maintaining pinyin spelling in Wade-Giles style in translating those cultural and technical terms, while necessary annotation and abundant illustrations are added. The translations of terms keep good consistency though those various volumes are published over decades. The translated texts constitute a significant part in each volume. The study highlights the important role of translation of non-literary texts in introducing Chinese science and culture. It argues that writing or editing books on Chinese science and technology is also a way of translating China and its civilisation, and therefore calls for academic attention on the translation study of more Chinese non-literary works
The Power of Political Persuasion: A Content Analysis of the Former Moroccan Prime Minister´s Speeches
Get PDFPersuasion is an essential perquisite in the construction of any type of discourse. The influential impact a discourse manipulator seeks to have on discourse receiver is an inherent constituent in the process of meaning making. Hence, the implementation of discursive and persuasive constructs helps the speaker/writer maintain their ideologies, representations and world view. One of the best manifestations of the persuasive power of discourse is, indeed, reflected in political discourse. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze the persuasive constructs in the political speeches of the former Moroccan Prime Minister Abd Elilah Benkirane as a step towards understanding the effect they had on the rise of his political party (PJD) during the Arab Revolutions. Interestingly, among the backbone persuasive devices the findings came up with, the deployment of comparison, proverbs, narrative persuaision and dexic pronouns were revealed as well
Images in the Meranaw Rina-Rinaw: An Intertextual Criticism
Get PDFThis study aims to discover the images in the Meranaw rina-rinaw and the distinctive features that make it sui generis. Through intertextual criticism, this study determines how faithful the rina-rinaw has remained to the prototype, the traditional bayok, or how far it has drifted from the latter. Specifically, this study seeks to do the following: (1) to characterize the imagery of the rina-rinaw; and, (2) to analyze how these images in rina-rinaw text represent the modern Meranaw culture. The findings revealed that the rina-rinaw texts employ a rich variety of imagery which are the essential stuff of which songs are made to draw traction and engage the listeners. They vivify the experience or world portrayed in the songs. These images found in the rina-rinaw texts are representations that connect meaning and language to culture. Most importantly, this study poses a challenge to future researchers to attempt forays into other aspects of the Meranaw culture. This study on the rina-rinaw as one of the many “undocumented” Meranaw art forms provides only a foretaste of much more that the unique and rich Meranaw cultural heritage has to offer
Religious Dilemma and Identity Crisis in Saud Alsanousi's The Bamboo Stalk (2015)
Get PDFThe current paper aims to investigate the religious identity crisis in the themes of Alsanousi's The Bamboo Stalk (2015). It also determines to explore the kinds of the identity status depicted in the novel as well as the causes of identity loss. The paper takes the qualitative approach for data interpretation and adopts the descriptive discourse analysis (DDA) method. The analysis is then guided by the intercultural communication theory (ICT). The paper found that the protagonist and some other characters face identity crisis and suffer from religious dilemma due to several reasons the most of which is the dominance of the socio-class norms that prevents religion from playing its role in making its adherents equal. The paper also confirms the negative effect of hybridization on the religious identity formation. It reinforces the validity of the application of ICT on fictive data and contributes new form of IC analysis on fictive data
Translation Strategies in Translating Toer’s Bumi Manusia
Get PDFTranslating Toer’s Bumi Manusia means translating Indonesian culture. As its translator, Lane has to provide English translation which is enjoyable, readable, and acceptable both culturally and linguistically. He solves the problem of nonequivalence by applying translation strategies. This research aims at finding out translation strategies Lane applies in translating Bumi Manusia into This Earth of Mankind. This research is qualitative in nature. There are five translation strategies Lane applies. The five strategies are translation by illustration, translation by cultural substitution, translation by using less expressive word, translation by omission, and translation by using a more general word. The research provides another perspective of how to deal with non-equivalence in translating Indonesian novel into English. In Lane’s case, he acts as a bridge connecting cultural gap between Indonesian and English. He uses English context to make his English translation readable
Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis of Text and Picture in Graphic Novel Batman: The Killing Joke
Get PDFUntil these days, it is rare to find a systemic functional linguistics analysis on
comic media. The combination of both is really interesting. Comic is a media to
tell messages using the mix of picture and text. With that context, comics have its
way to tell a message. Thus, the researcher adopted Spradley’s qualitative
analysis to analyze text and picture in the graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke.
The researcher analyzes the metafunctions on both text and picture using
Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics theory as the base and followed by
Martin & Rose’s multimodal discourse analysis theory. What the researcher
wants to find is divided into three: how comic tells a message through an image,
text, and text-image relation. First, the researcher found that through the image,
comic tends to distribute the information in a panel in a centralized way. Then, it
has an identical pattern in delivering interpersonal messages. In text analysis,
verbal process and verbal behavioral processes are so rare to appear. Last, there
is no notable indication in the relation to text and image. What the researcher
analyzes is the dialogue and monologue coming from the characters which are
mostly found in balloon speech and obviously refers to images
Hyperreal World and Simulated Identities in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Get PDFIn today’s postmodern world, the distinction between the real and the unreal has
become confusing. This confusion is due to the impact of new media information
and cybernetic technology; as a result, our personal and social life have gone under
fundamental changes. Our lives have been affected by unreal images and
information. We are being deceived by “Absolute Fake”. Philip K. Dick in his novel
portrays techno-consumer world with strange forms of media and technology that
lead to hyperreality, and simulation. Dick’s stories typically focus on the fragile
nature of reality and the construction of personal identity. His stories often become
surreal fantasies as the main characters slowly discover their everyday world is
actually an illusion. Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? illustrates a
futuristic world where the creation of the android leads to a blurring of the line
between the human and the android. Dick’s oeuvre wants to answer to two major
questions: “what is reality?” and “what is human being?” The philosophical guide
for the purpose of looking into Dick’s novel is Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of
simulation, simulacra and hyperreality. Simulacra to Baudrillard is more real than
real; it is hyperreal. The hyperreal is simulation and simulation is a copy of copy
which is removed from the original and even replaced by the original. Baudrillard
argues that the hyperreal world offers fake as a reality. He believes that in technoconsumer culture the models, images, and codes come to control our thoughts and
behaviors. In this novel, although characters consider technology and media
information as a source of achieving reality, by reading Baudriallrd’s theory, this
research wants to show that, there is no such a thing as reality and characters just
slip into hyperreality which disintegrate their identities
Gender Differences in Comprehending Literary Pieces Writing by Edgar Allan Poe among Senior High School Students
Get PDFGender roles have been so prominent in this generation. People always see gender differences in different aspects and try to find who has greater ability between male and female. Thus, this study compares the reading comprehension of the two different genders on the literary pieces written by Edgar Allan Poe. This study utilized the quantitative method specifically the comparative research design. In this study, a sample of 80 senior high school students from a certain University are randomly selected in which 40 of them are males and another 40 are females. The data gathered are analyzed using Ttest for independent samples. The findings reveal that there is a significant difference in the comprehension skills between the two (2) genders. Moreover, the results revealed that female students are superior in comprehending the literary pieces by Edgar Allan Poe compared to their counterparts. The findings explicate that female students established a higher level of understanding on the literary pieces and give the teachers an idea for them to come up with various strategies or differentiated instruction in order to address the existing differences between the gender groups