Translation

During the last three decades, especially 1980's, language learning specialists have been busy discovering the nature of language learning strategies, describing them, and formulating their relationships with other language learning factors. In line with these studies, the field of translation studies has undergone a complete revolution in terms of its perspective toward its research priorities; that is, recent works tend to adopt a more descriptive rather than prescriptive approach. One of the newly emerged trends in translation studies is the quest for the nature of mental processes applied while translating a text. Following this trend, the present study incorporates think-aloud protocols (TAPs) and retrospective interviews to probe the learning strategies employed by some university students during the translation of an expository text from English to Persian according to the taxonomy of learning strategies presented by Oxford (1990). The results show that (1) the participants tend to incorporate cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies as their dominant strategies, (2) there is no significant difference between direct and indirect strategies incorporated by the participants, and (3) the scope of the taxonomy proposed in the field of language teaching can be generalized to translation studies.

The present research aimed to investigate the effect of background Mozart Classical music on translator students' performance. In this study, the researchers focused not only on the relationship between music and translation but also on the relationship between music and personality traits. The main question this study tried to answer was whether using background music might enhance students' translation scores. To answer this question, 32 students from Islamic Azad University of Quchan, Iran, participated in this study. They were selected out of 40 students, employing Nelson proficiency test and were randomly assigned to two groups. The participants in experimental group were asked to translate three texts accompanied by background music, but the subjects in the control group were asked to translate the same texts without background music during three sessions. Students’ translations were scored based on Kim's (2009) meaning-oriented translation assessment model. Statistical analyses were applied for qualitative data and an interview was designed for the qualitative research question. Researchers concluded that there was a significant difference between the translation scores of the experimental and control groups. The former outperformed the latter group on the translation task.

This study aimed to explore the role of context in the selection of equivalents by translators with diverse worldviews, following the framework of Lotfi Gaskaree et al. (2023). A qualitative research design was employed, and verses were selected using purposive sampling. Five widely known English translations of the Holy Qur’ān were analyzed. The data encompassed nine Surahs, which were semantically analyzed to investigate the variation in lexical equivalents across the selected versions. The study focused on understanding the translators’ perspectives in selecting English equivalents for Qur’ānic vocabulary. Specifically, translations of Surah Al-Baqarah were examined, as rendered by Arberry, Shakir, Pickthall, and Yusuf Ali. Selected excerpts from each version were analyzed to explore differences in the Arabic-to-English lexical choices. Findings revealed notable differences in the translators’ degrees of familiarity and intimacy with Islamic and religious concepts. Translators influenced by Western worldviews tended to favor literal translations at the morphemic level, while those with Eastern perspectives leaned toward more meaningful or communicative translations. These variations highlight that English lexical choices in Qur’ānic translations are heavily context-bound and influenced by the translators’ cultural and ideological affiliations. The study acknowledges a limitation in the sample size, noting that a broader dataset exceeding nine Surahs could yield more comprehensive insights. Nonetheless, the findings offer valuable implications for cross-cultural translation theory, demonstrating that translators from different cultural backgrounds select lexical equivalents based on their worldviews. This study serves as a preliminary contribution to further semantic and contextual research in Qur’ānic translation.