Translating speech acts in a Persian translation of an English novel

Transcription

1 Journal of Educational Research and Studies Vol.1 (5), pp , October, ISSN: Peak Journals Full Length Research Paper Translating speech acts in a Persian translation of an English novel Masumeh Abasi Rad* and Leila Razmjou Accepted 19 July, 2013 The purpose of this study was to investigate the frequency of the speech acts of request and refusal in the English novel Animal Farm and its Persian translation in order to find out if the speech acts have been realized and rendered by the translator correctly and whether the directionality of the speech acts has been maintained in the translation. Searle s classification of speech acts was applied to accomplish the purpose of the study. The study focused on the conversations containing requests and refusals from the English novel Animal Farm and its Persian translation. The results were contrasted and the findings revealed that some significant differences exist in the way speech acts are realized in the English novel Animal Farm and its Persian translation in terms of the frequency of the correct and wrong translations of the mentioned speech acts with regard to directness and indirectness. The findings of this study can provide some insights into teaching translation to undergraduate translation trainees. This study implies that translators should consider many elements in translating aforementioned speech acts of the novels and other kinds of texts. First of all, translators should recognize speech acts in the source text translate them correctly into the target language and preserve its directionality or indirectionality in the target language. Second, familiarity with speech acts and translation of them help English language instructors in a translation course. Third, understanding the meaning of speech acts in the context also has an important role in good translating. Key words: Translating, speech acts, Persian translation, English novel. Department of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Tehran, Iran. *Corresponding author. masumehabasirad@ymail.com INTRODUCTION Modern linguistics has been referred to as the study of language as a system of human communication. A main observation is that language can be used not only to describe the reality but also to change the existing reality. In simple words, it can be asserted to speak is to act. Linguistic acts that intend to influence the reality are commonly called speech acts. As functional units, speech acts play an important role in effective communication. Having been the basic ingredients of pragmatics, the principles of speech act theory provide an account of how some apparently formally unconnected utterances go together in conversational discourse to form a coherent sequence. However, the effects of different factors such as cultural norms, situation of speech, linguistic context of an utterance and the role relationship between participants in interpreting an utterance should not be underestimated. Orthodox speech act theory suggests that all speech acts, in any language anywhere in the world, fall into five categories: Assertives, Directives, Commissives, Expressives and Declaratives. This is Searle s (1979) classification of speech acts which the examination and the analysis of the present study is based on. The present research investigated mentioned speech acts regarding their directionality or indirectionality in translation but Eslami-Rasekh et al. (2010) investigated Americans and Iranians use of requests with regard to the speaker s assumed expectations of compliance in

2 Masumeh and Leila 51 choosing from the conventionally indirect spectrum. 22 Native American students of Fresno State University and 30 Iranian English M.A. students of Isfahan University participated in this research. The data was collected through role plays post performance interviews and questionnaires. The result indicated that in comparable situations, the Americans are more certain that the addressee would comply with the request than Iranians and it seemed that conventional indirectness expresses different social meanings in English and Persian. Generally, regarding the literature no study has been conducted on suggestion speech act in Persian. Therefore this study intended to investigate suggestion speech act realizations through English and Persian languages in order to detect the intercultural similarities and variations. Allami (2006) argued that unlike direct complaint gripping is a non-face-threatening speech act in which the party or object of complaint is not present. While direct complaint as defined by Brown and Levinson (1987) is a face-threatening act it has been claimed that griping carries no face threat. Furthermore, unlike direct complaint which is used to call for negotiation griping is used as a means to invoke commiseration. He studied the responses provided for gripping in terms of six major categories: 1) topic switch/blank reply 2) question 3) contradiction 4) joking/teasing 5) advice 6) agreement/commiseration. Five items were griping on different subject matters among friends five items among family members another five on casual matters among strangers and the last five on deeper and more challenging matters (for example, political) among strangers. The findings revealed that in response to gripping Iranian students most of the time feel obliged to further conversation and maintain solidarity through the use of the supportive speech act of commiseration. However they do not support Boxer s (1993a) finding that women participate more in trouble-talks than men or that women mostly commiserate with gripping, while men contradict or give advice. Sahragard (2001) made an investigation of what was this all-pervading feature of the Iranian culture. He used an approach that is based on the fact that in all human languages there are some basic terms functioning as bases for other concepts. In other words the former concepts are primitives. These primitive concepts are used to describe cultural rules of speaking or cultural scripts. Thus this study took a cultural script approach to describe the Persian concept of ta arof, which is a Persian form of civility emphasizing both self-deference and social rank. The elicitation methods have been used to gather instances of ta arof and also to know the views of the native speakers on this issue. The methods were questionnaires interviews and observation. 220 male and female participants answered the questions in the questionnaires and 27 university lecturers participated in the interviews. Previous studies conducted on perceptions of American request forms (Abdolrezapour and Eslami- Rasekh 2010) and reprimands (Ahmadian and Vahid- Dastjerdi 2010) by Iranian EFL learners and American native speakers pointed to significant differences with regard to perceptions of the social power and social distance between the interlocutors. Iranians paid more attention to the social power of the addressee, while Americans were more concerned about the social distance variable. This paper tries to answer the following research question: Is there any difference between requests and refusals in the English novel Animal Farm and its Persian translation with regard to their directionality? The present study is an attempt to investigate the frequency of two speech acts, namely in the English novel and its translation in order to find out the probable differences in speech acts if they were translated correctly in terms of directness and indirectness to identify if direct/indirect speech acts were translated in direct/indirect forms. METHODOLOGY The English novel Animal Farm and its Persian Translation are used to identify if the translator has translated direct speech acts in a direct form and whether the translator has translated indirect speech acts in an indirect form. Design The design of this study was descriptive and contrastive. And in terms of language, again it can be claimed that the language used in both English and Persian corpus was the same as unmarked variety of language, which is comprehensible for ordinary Iranian and English audiences. In the present study, two speech acts of request and refusal have been examined and analyzed in terms of the frequency and also based on the above-mentioned theory of speech acts (Searle, 1979) in the English novel Animal Farm and its Persian translation. The study has focused on those interactions containing requests and refusals for further analysis and examination in terms of frequency. The unit of analysis in this study is utterance, which, according to Verschcueren (1999), is defined as any stretch of language, no matter how long or short and no matter how many voices it may contain. The examples include direct and indirect speech acts. Finally, the results were contrasted to find out if there were any significant differences in speech acts used in English

3 Percent (%) J. Educ. Res. Stud. 52 Table 1. Correct and incorrect translation of request. Valid request Frequency Percent (%) Valid percent (%) Cumulative percent (%) Correct translation of request Incorrect translation of request Total Figure 1. Percentage of correct and incorrect translation of request. novel Animal Farm and its translation in terms of frequency to find out how direct/indirect speech acts were translated. Procedure The data were collected through reading the abovementioned speech acts in the English novel Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) and its Persian translation by Amir Shahi in order to identify if these Requests and refusals were translated correctly in a direct or indirect form from the English novel Animal Farm according to the tone of the sentences in its Persian translation. RESULTS Table 1 and Figure 1 clearly illustrate the frequency of correct and incorrect Persian translations of requests in the English novel Animal Farm. According to Table 1 and Figure 1 and by considering Searle s (1979) classification it can be argued that 90.7% of the requests were translated correctly and 9.3% of the requests were translated incorrectly. By considering Searle s (1979) classification it can be argued that 100% of refusals were translated correctly in illustrating the frequency of correct translation of refusals in the English novel Animal Farm. Table 2 and Figure 2 clearly illustrate the frequency of indirect and direct speech acts of request in the English novel Animal Farm. According to Table 2 and Figure 2 and by considering Searle s (1979) classification, it can be argued that 48.6% of request speech acts are indirect and 51.4% of request speech acts are direct in the English novel Animal Farm. Table 3 and Figure 3 clearly illustrate the frequency of indirect and direct speech acts of request in the Persian translation of the English novel Animal Farm. According to Table 3 and Figure 3 and by considering Searle s (1979) classification, it can be argued that 48.6% of request speech acts are indirect and 51.4 % of request speech acts are direct in the Persian translation of the English novel Animal Farm. DISCUSSION The present research investigated mentioned speech

4 Percent (%) Masumeh and Leila 53 Table 2. Frequency of directionality and indirectionality in the English novel. Valid request Frequency Percent (%) Valid percent (%) Cumulative percent (%) Indirect speech act of request Direct speech act of request Total Figure 2. Percentage of directionality and indirectionality in the English novel. acts regarding their directionality or indirectionality in translation but Eslami-Rasekh et al. (2010) investigated Americans and Iranians use of requests with regard to the speaker s assumed expectations of compliance in choosing from the conventionally indirect spectrum. 22 Native American students of Fresno State University and 30 Iranian English M.A. students of Isfahan University participated in this research. The data was collected through role plays post performance interviews and questionnaires. The result indicated that in comparable situations, the Americans are more certain that the addressee would comply with the request than Iranians and it seemed that conventional indirectness expresses different social meanings in English and Persian. Generally, regarding the literature no study has been conducted on suggestion speech act in Persian. Therefore this study intended to investigate suggestion speech act realizations through English and Persian languages in order to detect the intercultural similarities and variations. In this study, with respect to the research questions, mentioned speech acts were identified. A descriptive test was administered to find out the frequency of two speech acts in the novel and its translation and if the translator has translated direct speech acts in a direct form and whether the translator has translated indirect speech acts in an indirect form. In order to interpret the obtained results and draw a precise conclusion, the researcher needs to resort to several factors whose contributions to the correct interpretation of the findings cannot be underestimated. Since language is a social phenomenon and it is a medium of interaction among people, the apparent effects of many factors such as the context of the situation, the cultural background of the participants in the talk, the values of the discourse community, the use of the particular lexical and grammatical language features and the role relationship among the interlocutors have to be taken into account. This study implies that translators should consider

5 Percent (%) J. Educ. Res. Stud. 54 Table 3. Frequency of directionality and indirectionality in the Persian translation. Valid request Frequency Percent (%) Valid percent (%) Cumulative percent (%) Indirect speech act of request Direct speech act of request Total Figure 3. Frequency of directionality and indirectionality in the Persian translation. many elements in translating the aforementioned speech acts of the novels and other kinds of texts. First of all, translators should recognize speech acts in the source text translate them rightly into the target language as well as preserve their directionality or indirectionality in the target language. In fact, the function of speech acts should be preserved. Secondly, familiarity with speech acts and translation of them help English language instructors in a translation course. Thirdly, understanding the meaning of speech acts in the context also has an important role in good translating. Generally speaking, the translator should not translate the source text literally and traditionally. It means that if speech act is direct, the translator should translate it in a direct form and if speech act is indirect, the translator should translate it in an indirect form. In other words, function of speech act should be preserved. This paper investigated mentioned speech acts in terms of translation. Due to limited availability of time, the study was carried out with a few materials which are as follows: First of all, the research was conducted by investigating just two speech acts of Request and Refusal. Secondly, the study was conducted by reading just one English novel. Thirdly, the study was conducted by reading just one Persian translation. This study can be conducted by examining a number of other materials and speech acts which are as follows: First of all, more novels, drama and newspapers can be studied in this respect. Secondly, other speech acts like apologizing, forgiving, gratitude, drawing attention, pleasure and surprise can be studied in this research. Thirdly, more translations of the texts can be studied in a contrastive form. The study was conducted to investigate the speech acts of Request and Refusal in a Persian translation of the English Novel Animal Farm and the English Novel Animal Farm. In this regard, direct and indirect speech acts of request and correct and wrong translations of the

6 Masumeh and Leila 55 aforementioned speech acts were identified to conclude if direct/indirect speech acts were translated in a direct/indirect form or not to conclude whether the translation of those speech acts is correct or wrong. This research has one question which will be answered as follows: Is there any difference between requests and refusals in the English novel Animal Farm and its Persian translation with regard to their directionality? Based on the findings of the present study, it appears that there was a statistical difference in the application of speech acts of Request and Refusal in the English novel Animal Farm and its Persian translation in terms of correct and incorrect translations. 90.7% of requests were translated correctly, 9.3% of requests were translated incorrectly and 100% of refusals were translated correctly; this agrees with the study by Eslami- Rasekh et al. (2010). However, there was no wrong translation of refusal speech act. Based on the findings of the present study, it appears that there was a statistical difference in the application of Requests in terms of directness and indirectness. 48.6% of requests are indirect and 51.4% of requests are direct in the English novel Animal Farm. Likewise, 48.6% of requests have been translated indirectly and 51.4% of requests have been translated directly in the Persian translation of Animal Farm. REFERENCES Abdolrezapour P, Eslami-Rasekh A (2010). A cross-cultural study of perception of politeness by Iranians and Americans in Request Forms. Pak. J. Soc. Sci. 7(2): Ahmadian MJ, Vahid-Dastjerdi H (2010). A comparative study of perception of politeness of American reprimands by Iranian EFL Learners and Americans. The Soc. Sci. 5(4): Allami H (2006). A sociopragmatic analysis of gripping: The case of Iranian students. Asian EFL J. 1: Boxer D (1993a). Complaining and commiserating: A speech act view of solidarity in spoken American English. New York: Peter Lang. Brown P, Levinson SC (1987). Politeness: Some principles in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eslami-Rasekh AA Tavakoli M Abdolrezapour P (2010). Certainty and conventional indirectness in Persian and American Request forms. Medwell Journal. The Soc. Sci. 5(4): Doi: /science George Orwell (1945). Animal Farm, published in England on 17 August. Sahragard R (2001). A cultural script analysis of a politeness feature in Persian. Schiffrin D (1994). Approaches to Discourse. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Searle JR (1979). Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verschueren J (1999). Understanding pragmatics. London and New York: Arnold.