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Literary translation is a vehicle for the transmission of ideological values from one culture to another. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of two Persian metatexts of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, this article examines how these translators represent the text’s themes of gender and race. By implementing an integrated framework developed by Farahzad, the critical discourse analyses examine three dimensions of each metatext: textual, paratextual, and semiotic. The Comparative CDA findings demonstrate that Dowlatabadi’s metatext diminishes the confrontational nature of the prototext by euphemizing, generalizing gendered terms, and neutralizing racial terminology. While this strategy creates opportunities for greater cultural accessibility for the Persian audience, it also undermines the original feminist and anti-racist critiques. Conversely, Elahbakhsh retained the prototext’s directness, sociolinguistic texture, and ideological tension. Elahbakhsh’s commitment to the prototext is further strengthened through the use of extensive scholarly apparatus (introductions, endnotes, etc.). This study found that translators play a significant role in mediating ideas through their work. By making decisions about how to translate individual words and cover designs, translators change how readers interpret and respond to a text’s political message. This research highlights the need for greater ethical consideration of the effects of translation practice on how literature is transformed across cultures.

 

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This study explores the interplay cultural identity (CI), cultural intelligence/cultural quotient (CQ), and critical intercultural awareness (CIA) among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners with a focus on the potential influence of gender and educational context. To this end, a total of 192 EFL learners (122 language institute and 70 senior secondary school) in Tehran (120 females and 72 males) of different ages (17-35) from different language institutes and senior secondary schools took part in the study. The participants completed the Cultural Identity Clarity Scale (Usborne & Taylor, 2010), the Cultural Intelligence Scale (Ang et al., 2007), and the Critical Intercultural Awareness Questionnaire (Susilo, 2022). The results indicated that EFL learners’ cultural identity and intelligence/cultural quotient (CQ) were significantly associated with critical intercultural awareness (CIA). Moreover, EFL learners’ CQ was found to be the strongest predictor of critical intercultural awareness (CIA). The findings also revealed that gender and educational context played significant roles: female EFL learners had higher levels of cultural identity, cultural intelligence/cultural quotient, and critical intercultural awareness than their male counterparts. Moreover, the results designated that EFL learners in language institutes had higher levels of cultural identity, cultural intelligence/cultural quotient, and critical intercultural awareness than senior secondary school counterparts. The results can offer valuable insights for EFL policymakers, managers, curriculum developers seeking to enhance intercultural competence in language education within the Iranian context.
 

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Abstract

The increasing popularity of AI writing tools raises the question of how students perceive the fairness of automated feedback, particularly in comparison with teacher feedback. The perceived fairness of the feedback is an underexplored subject. This paper investigated the perceived fairness of AI writing feedback among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students compared to teacher writing feedback and the relationship between students’ acceptance of AI writing feedback. The design was quantitative, within-subjects and it was based on 35 B1–B2 EFL students who were enrolled in an English language institute. The participants were given a brief writing assignment and were provided with teacher feedback as well as AI feedback. Subsequently, they completed a survey that assessed perceived fairness, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and acceptance (intention to use) AI feedback. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-tests, correlation, and regression. Findings indicated that teacher feedback was perceived as significantly fairer than AI feedback. The AI feedback was positively evaluated. Perceived fairness was related to students’ acceptance of AI feedback. The regression analyses indicated that acceptance was predicted by perceived fairness, usefulness and perceived ease of use jointly, but usefulness emerged as the strongest predictor. The findings imply that AI feedback is most effective when it is used as a complement to teacher feedback in EFL writing instruction.
 

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This study examines how emotion wrods are reflected in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) textbooks. This research focuses on two textbook series, namely Touch Stone and Four Corners, and evaluates them based on emotional words. To investigate the emotional impact of the textbooks, TagAnt and AntConc tools were employed, using the English word database of emotional terms (EMOTE) by Daniel Grühn. Emotion words with a range higher than 5 and lower than 2 were selected to gauge their degree of emotionality refelected in the analyzed textbooks. The findings indicate that the Touch Stone series contains a higher range of emotional words compared to Four Corners. Finally, the attitudes and experiences of teachers towards the emotion words represented were examined through interviews with a focused group of English language teachers.
 

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This study explores the challenges of translating humor and cultural references in the Persian subtitles of The Golden Girls, Season 5, Episode 24. The primary objective is to identify and analyze the translation strategies used in semiprofessional Persian subtitles and to compare them with AI-generated translations, to determine whether the loss of comedic tone, dilution of culture-specific elements, and difficulty conveying sarcasm persist or manifest differently within subtitling constraints when using AI tools. The analysis reveals common human strategies like adaptation, omission, and domestication used to address these challenges. Our findings indicate that while AI translations may achieve greater literal accuracy and consistency, they often exhibit a more pronounced failure in replicating comedic timing, recognizing nuanced sarcasm, and making contextually appropriate cultural substitutions, instead defaulting to overly literal or culturally neutral renderings that further diminish the source text's humor and cultural specificity. The paper proposes solutions, including cultural adaptation, creative clarification, and hybrid human-AI workflows to improve viewer understanding. The findings underscore the critical balance between staying faithful to the source and ensuring accessibility for the target audience in audiovisual translation, highlighting the continued irreplaceable role of human cultural and comedic intuition.

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Neologisms emerge within the language mainstream and constitute an indispensable aspect, particularly in literature and new phenomena in our lives. These novel terms, born from creative minds, often lack defined equivalents in other languages, posing challenges for translators. In the realm of translation studies, neologisms, especially those related to the coronavirus pandemic, have garnered significant attention. This study focuses on slang "coroneologisms" and their translations compiled by Thone (2020). Utilizing the resources provided by english-corpora.org, the frequency of coroneologisms was examined.  A questionnaire featuring a selection of the most frequently occurring neologisms was randomly selected and distributed to twenty-nine translators to gauge their translation approaches. The results, classified according to Newmark's (1988) taxonomy to reveal the normalization status of equivalents. Strategies employed for translating normalized examples are identified using Molina and Albir's (2020) framework. The study finds that various neologism types, such as blends and derived words, undergo normalization, primarily through translation into blends. While translators employ diverse strategies like amplification and generalization, they generally lead to normalization. However, old words with new meanings often face mistranslations or omissions rather than normalization. Overall, blends emerge as the most normalized neologism type, whereas old words with new senses exhibit the least normalization.

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Abstract: In the globalized world today, translation plays an important role to make people of all around the world closer together by introducing each other’s cultures. However, translation is impossible in some cases or it is, sometimes, a severely challenging task for translator, due to the existence of cultural items or conceptualizations. This study determined and rated the translation strategies applied in the translation of a sample of culture specific items (CSIs) in the English translation of the novel “Missing Soluch” by Dowlatabadi. To do so, 46 culture-specific items were selected from this novel, based on purposive sampling and text analysis of the field of Cultural Linguistics. Then, the applied strategies for translating these items were determined and classified through utilizing the Newmark’s (1988) translation classification. Results revealed that the most frequent translation strategies were “functional equivalence”, “literal translation” and “descriptive equivalence. However, the most successful strategy was applying “functional equivalence” which leads to more loyalty of target text to the source text and preserving the source text impression on the target audience.