English Studies at NBU

Mapping translation history in Iran: A scientometric study of journal articles,

Fatemeh Parham — 2025-12-20

This study presents a scientometric analysis of scholarly publications on the history of translation in Iran, encompassing 370 articles published over a fifty-year period. Using VOSviewer for data visualization, the research identifies and maps eight key dimensions of the articles: journal titles, journal affiliation, publication date, publication place, historical periods, themes, theoretical frameworks, and text genres. The findings reveal a significant increase in publication volume in recent years, particularly from 2011 onward, coinciding with the academic institutionalization of translation studies in Iran. Tehran and Mashhad emerged as the dominant centers of scholarly output, reflecting their status as hubs for major universities and specialized journals. Thematic analysis uncovered 56 recurring themes, with a predominant focus on linguistic and bibliographical aspects of translation as well as translation movement. The most studied historical periods were the Contemporary, Abbasid, Qajar, Islamic Republic of Iran, and Pahlavi eras, while literary and religious texts were the most commonly examined genres. Although only a minority of articles engaged with explicit theoretical frameworks, the field shows clear signs of development. Overall, the study offers a broad picture of how research on translation history has evolved in the Iranian academic context over the past five decades.

A woman is no man. A translator is (no) author? Resisting the shared subordination of women and translators through translatorhandling

Ayşe Saki Demirel — 2025-12-20

This article proposes translatorhandling as a conceptual framework to theorize the intentional and strategic interventions made by feminist translators across textual, peritextual, and epitextual realms. It aims to expand the current understanding of translator visibility and reframe the role of the feminist translator within the evolving field of Feminist Translation Studies (FTS). This study argues that through translatorhandling, feminist translators not only 'womanhandle' texts to amplify silenced women's voices and make language speak for women but also assert their creative agency and professional visibility primarily through epitextual channels. Etaf Rum's A Woman is No Man and its Turkish translation, Kadının Sesi Yok ['A woman has no voice'] by Arzu Altınanıt, constitute the case of this research. Thematic analysis of Altınanıt's blog, Bir Çevirmenin Dünyası ['A Translator's World'], and her X (formerly Twitter) posts demonstrates how she engages in translatorhandling as a form of dual resistance: amplifying women's voices and challenging the systemic invisibility of translators. The findings reveal how she publicly claims interpretive agency, contests the industry's erasure of translators, and positions herself as a co-creator. Mapping this emerging practice, the article highlights translatorhandling as a powerful feminist intervention that transcends textual boundaries, positioning translator's voice as a force of solidarity and transformation in public discourse.

The political uses and abuses of 'gender' in translation

Kornelia Slavova — 2025-12-20

The paper attends to the relationship between translation, language, and politics, focusing on the appropriation of the key Anglo-American feminist term 'gender' into Bulgarian and its political uses and abuses in the recent context of the global crusade against the so called 'gender ideology'. It traces the troubled history of the term which was transplanted in the post-communist world in the 1990s via translation but has not been well translated and understood in Bulgarian society. Through an array of specific examples from diverse registers such as academic publications, institutional policy papers, and EU documents in translation, the paper aims to show how inconsistency and inaccuracy in translation practices have had political consequences during and after the campaign against the ratification of the Istanbul convention on the prevention and combating of violence against women, when the term was highly contested and emptied out of meaning. It is argued that conservative forces have instrumentalized the linguistic confusion surrounding ambiguous and poor translations of the term 'gender' to trigger deeper fears and prejudices related to women's equality, transgender rights, and the EU liberal agenda. Working at the intersection of feminist politics of location and politics of translation, the paper poses questions about the limits of translatability and applicability of major transnational feminist terms. It also offers some options for getting out of the gender impasse in Bulgarian translation.

Integrating translation project management into translator training as a part of translation technology course

Caner Çetiner — 2025-12-20

Translation project management has become an indispensable part of the professional translation process with ever-increasing translation volume and complicated translation jobs. Given the essence of translation project management for the translation industry, translator training programs are also expected to equip their students with the relevant translation project management skills. To this end, this study aims to uncover the trainee translators' views of translation project management tools taught within the context of a translation technology course. Based on the data collected with open-ended questions followed by semi-structured short individual interviews, the study attempted to explore the practices needed to integrate essential project management skills and special tools into translator training. After a scrutinized thematic analysis of collected data, the phrases and patterns were noted, and then they were classified to form the themes. The findings show that students support the use of scenario-based instruction; problem-solving skills are improved through scenarios; using scenarios provides a collaborative learning environment. The interpretation of the responses also draws attention to the need for computer labs dedicated to translation departments and underlines the individual differences among students in terms of working in a team.

Object insertion in Old English verbs of throwing: A corpus-based study

Juan Gabriel Vázquez-González — 2025-12-20

This study demonstrates for the first time that ballistic motion is part of Old English ditransitives, functioning in the Nominative-Accusative-Dative construction. A search for throw terms in A Thesaurus of Old English generates a pilot list of candidates, whose participation in ditransitives is verified through queries performed on the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. The findings reveal a relatively diverse group of 14 verb types and 51 tokens expressing deictically directed transfer (i.e., throwing to and from), with some units emphasizing force or manner of motion. In line with Diachronic Construction Grammar, the new verb class is incorporated into a lexicality-schematicity hierarchy, a semantic map proposal for the group is discussed in detail, and the argument structure of Old English throw verbs is formalized into boxes and described. This study pays particular attention to the typological distinction between basic and derived coding frames, and, more specifically, to object insertion as a mechanism for generating ditransitives from primary caused-motion constructions. A comparison of the argument structures found in the Old English corpus with those of their modern English counterparts suggests a lower degree of constructionalization in the Old English throw group, based on the frequent presence of a fourth argument, a directional.

Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics in empirical research: A systematic literature review

Ángela Alameda-Hernández — 2025-12-20

Motivated by the long-standing connection between Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this paper presents the first systematic literature review of the most frequent and productive linguistic features from SFL that are applied in practice by CDA analysts. Guided by PRISMA 2020 and following the SALSA framework, 4 databases (Wiley, Scopus, Sage Publications, and ProQuest) were searched, from which 78 papers were extracted and statistically analyzed with the TexMiLAB tool. The linguistic features that are most productive in CDA are lexical choices and evaluative lexis at the lexico-semantic level; while at the grammatical level, it is the type of processes and type of participants, together with the analysis of other linguistic elements, such as metaphors and quotations. The systems of Transitivity and Modality, and Appraisal theory are more recurrent over the remarkably underused Theme system. It could be argued that, to a large extent, SFL remains central to CDA research, although some CDA practitioners do not seem to follow a systematic methodology when applying SFL to their analysis.

Correlation between emotional intelligence and English language proficiency in Colombian secondary school students

Ailyn Jariany Garnica-Rey — 2025-12-20

This research examined the correlation between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and English proficiency among 30 students aged 11-12 from a public school in Colombia. Participants were selected using simple random sampling, and data were collected through a non-experimental, quantitative, correlational design with a Pearson correlation analysis. EI was assessed using the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test, while English proficiency was measured using the Cambridge A1 Movers exam. Findings showed that EI had a weak to moderate positive correlation with Overall English Proficiency (OEP), and a moderate positive correlation with Listening skills, with correlations of r = 0.38 and r = 0.49, respectively. As the results were statistically significant, through a regression analysis, it was found that EI individually contributed 14.7% and 24.3% to the mentioned variables. However, there was a weak, but statistically insignificant, correlation with the other skills. We concluded that EI may enhance OEP, particularly influencing listening skills; nonetheless, further research is needed, as other factors may have influenced the results.

Vocabulary composition in children with autism spectrum disorder

Mihaela Barokova — 2025-12-20

In this paper we compare the distribution of four word categories in the lexical development of Bulgarian children with autism spectrum disorder to a normative Bulgarian sample. There is an emphasis on nominal/noun bias, which has been assumed to be a universal characteristic of language development. The data of Bulgarian children with autism presents a pattern similar to that of the normative sample including a high percent of social words in their expressive vocabulary.

Editors' Message

Stan Bogdanov — 2025-12-20

Editor's Message
Volume11, Issue 2, 2025

English for IT Communication – Book review

Huu-Chanh Nguyen — 2025-12-20

Book Details:

Title:
English for IT Communication

Autors:
Tony Myers, Jaime Buchanan

Publisher: Routledge

Number of pages: 220 pages

Year of publication: 2025

ISBN: 9781032647500 (hardback),

Also available as:
9781032647494 (paperback),
9781032647524 (eBook)

A Propaedeutics of Translation Studies – Book review

Antony Hoyte-West — 2025-12-20

Book Details:

Title:
A Propaedeutics of Translation Studies

Autors:
Klaudia Bednárová-Gibová, Miroslava Gavurová, Jonathan Gresty

Publisher: Prešovská univerzita v Prešove vo Vydavateľstve Prešovskej univerzity

Number of pages: 194 pages

Year of publication: 2024

ISBN:
978-80-555-3302-5 (print),

Also available as:
978-80-555-3294-3 (eBook)