Unveiling the Tausug Culture in Parang Sabil through Translation

Translation communicates through language and facilitates the spread of information and culture.It is a conscious semantic transfer of culturalitems from one culture to another. In this paper, it aims to unveil the culture of the Tausugs, the people of Sulu, Philippines, in doing the jihad (holy war) through the translation of the parang sabil, a folk narrative song. Anchored on the interpretative theory of translation, this study translates the contemporary parang sabil titled Kissa sin Pagbunu ha Zambo written in Bahasa Sug, a language spoken among the Tausugs, into English. Performed by the Tausug lady named Indah Anjam, Kissa sin Pagbunu ha Zambo (The Story of War in Zambo) talks about the heroic act of Ustadz Habir Malik during the Zamboanga siege in 2013. By mobilizing the researchers’ knowledge in Bahasa Sug, English, and Tausug history and culture, linguistic and cultural issues were addressed in the English translation to maintain the sense or culture of doing the Tausug jihad. The researchers faithfully expressed in the English translation the culture of the Tausugs by maintaining the identity of the Tausugs as Muslims, by showing that the Tausugs are in unity to defend their homeland and religion, and by projecting that they are brave warriors in defense of Islam. Hence, translating this particular Tausug parang sabil placed in its cultural context is an urgent work to do in order to enlarge our consciousness on Tausug culture and history.

Sakāmvārdi un parunas: atšķirīgais un līdzīgais

One of the most important issues in paremiology is the demarcation of the types of expressions of an oral creative nature. When proverbs and sayings are included in dictionaries, collections, or school assignments, not only they are not separated, but the compilation also includes units with different structures – sentences, word groups; figures of speech – comparisons, and units, which according to the semantic and syntactic structure could be attributed to proverbs, namely, the heterogeneity of units is obvious. Publications of paremia together are not the arbitrariness of dictionary authors or compilers; proverbs and sayings intersect, bind and grow from a common origin. Both types of paremia have much in common: two-membered structure, isosyllabic rhythm, assonance, alliteration, repetition and rhymes, lexical and syntactic archaisms, implicative structure. But there is no shortage of differences. It is considered that proverbs distinguish from sayings by their generalized meaning. Sometimes, in order to delimit a saying from a proverb, in addition to metaphoricity, a connotation is added, or the semantic transfer of the signifier, indicating that the saying is an unconnotated and non-metaphorical expression, while the proverb is connoted and metaphorical. The question remains to distinguish sayings from proverbs that are used only in the direct sense, i.e. units that do not have metaphoricity.

Cultural meanings in language: metaphors of vanity

The article is devoted to the study of metaphorization in the field of abstract categories in linguistic consciousness on the example of the cultural meaning “vanity”. The aim of the article is to establish the role and functions of metaphorical transfer in the visualization of abstract cultural meanings. The work used the methods of semantic, component, definitional and conceptual analysis, with the help of which the means and functions of semantic transfer in the metaphorization of vanity were investigated. The material for the research was the collected corpus of aphoristic sentences about vanity and the contexts of the metaphorical representation of vanity in the National Corpus of the Russian language. It is established that the metaphor in the language performs two main functions: cognitive, which gives the intellect the ability to comprehend something rationally incomprehensible, and expressive-evaluative, which allows the subject of speech to emotionally highlight any aspects and characteristics of the object. In the visualization of vanity, all the main types of metaphorical transfer on the auxiliary subject are used. Of the totality of semantic features of any category, in most cases, only a few are metaphorically distinguished, and these are connotative, evaluative features that are not associated with its definitional core. The attribute of negative evaluativeness in the semantics of vanity is metaphorized through the assimilation of this personal property to various kinds of unpleasant, harmful and dangerous creatures, plants, phenomena and objects. Like all “sinful passions” that subjugate a person and take possession of his will, vanity in speech is easily demonized – it is likened to “evil spirits”, mainly a demon. A specific feature of “reflexive feelings” – directed at oneself – conveys the likeness of vanity to a certain expanding substance, blowing a person from inside. In isolated cases, the likening of vanity to a crooked mirror and cotton wool metaphorizes such an essential semantic features of it as the imaginary, emptiness and futility of flaunting virtues. Thus, the study indicates that when metaphorizing abstract categories, which include vanity, not definitional semantic features of this category are visualized, but mainly semantic features relevant to assessment and emotional attitude of the subject of speech.

The Application of Greco-Roman Mythology Learning in English Vocabulary Teaching from the Perspective of Etymology

Language is the carrier of culture and culture nourishes language. According to statistics, 56% of the commonly used 10,000 English words are adopted from Latin and ancient Greek, which are the carrier languages of Roman civilization and Greek civilization respectively. Greco-Roman mythology, with its rich cultural connotation, permeates all aspects of people's social life in English-speaking countries and becomes a source of vitality for the expansion of English vocabulary. Etymology, the scientific study of the origin of words, is crucial in English vocabulary teaching, as etymological study improves vocabulary learning. This paper adopts the methodology of literature research to gather materials about English vocabulary teaching methods, etymology theory, and Greco-Roman mythological origin of English vocabulary. In order to better explain the cultural connotation of words in English vocabulary teaching, this paper proposes method of applying Greco-Roman mythology learning in English vocabulary teaching, and classifies English vocabulary into four forms according to etymological motivation: direct use, metaphorical use, semantic transfer and derivation from the perspective of Greco-Roman mythological origin, thus stimulating English learners' interest and improving the efficiency of both teaching and learning.

POLYSEMY OF RUSSIAN ADJECTIVES IN THE COGNITIVE ASPECT

Russian polysemous adjectives is one of the important issues in the study of the lexical semantics of the Russian language. Its essence lies in the methods of understanding the semantic content of adjectives and establishing internal connections between their meanings. Cognitive metaphor as a key working mechanism can clearly explain the phenomenon of Russian adjectives polysemy. This study uses the theory of cognitive metaphor that contains many working mechanisms affecting the change in the lexical semantics of adjectives. Among them, semantic transfer between cognitive domains is one of the most typical and active mechanisms. The present study is based on two original cognitive domains: the domain of space and the domain of physical perception. Under the cognitive effect of transferring from the original domain to other domains, adjectives acquire different meanings. This research focuses upon Russian polysemous spatial adjectives and adjectives of physical perception...

Lexico – Semantic Transfer in the Interlanguage of Serbophone Students Learning Italian as L2 and Spanish as L3

Lexical transfer, ie the influence of the student's knowledge of a word of one language on the knowledge or use of words in the target language is an important cognitive process in learning a new language students often use as a compensation strategy. This paper deals with errors in the interlanguage of L1 Serbian students learning two typologically similar languages: Italian and Spanish, which arose as a consequence of lexico - semantic transfer. The most frequent errors caused by lexico - semantic transfer were identified and classified by the method of error analysis. An extremely large number of cases of lexico-semantic transfer were found in the corpus. All errors are classified into five categories: loan translations, semantic extension, cognates or false friends, hybrids and complete language shifts. In all cases, the negative lexical transfer occurred with words that are similar in Italian and Spanish. The errors in the written production in Spanish did not originate from the typologically distant, although the most dominant language of the students - Serbian as L1, but from the typologically similar Italian as L2. This proves the hypothesis that in typologically similar languages, lexical transfer is the most common and also that the factors of language distance and psychotypology are the key linguistic factors that will cause the transfer. Moreover, this kind of transfer was mainly used as a compensation strategy that students relied on to fill lexical gaps in situations where they did not have sufficient knowledge of the target language. Among the lexical errors, the largest number concerns cognates or false friends and hybrids. On the other hand, examples of loan translations or calques and semantic extensions were not frequent, so we conclude that the transfer of form (lexical transfer) is more frequent than the transfer of meaning (semantic transfer).

Ἰσοδυναµέω and Translation into Greek in Sirach

The meaning of the verb ἰσοδυναµέω in the prologue to the translation of Ben Sira has often been thought to concern semantic transfer. That is, words translated into Greek do not mean the same as their Hebrew counterparts. In an earlier article, I made some suggestions about how to read the prologue as a whole. In an article that partially responded to my earlier publication, Dries De Crom examined the root ἰσοδυναµ* in texts from the fourth century BCE to the second century CE, and demonstrated that this verb does not refer to semantic adequacy. In this article I examine some of the texts discussed by De Crom in greater detail in an attempt to bring additional specificity to the meaning of this verb in Sirach, concluding that in using the verb in a context of interlinguistic exchange, the translator created a new meaning, to have an equal rhetorical/aesthetic effect.

Writing in Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL): Towards Finding a Balance between Translation Dependency and Creative Writing

The main objective of the paper is to assess the effect of Google translation and other software applications on the students’ writing in Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL). Its central hypothesis hinges on the possibility that some students’ errors are attributable to translation mishaps. The research is based on three main areas of enquiry: first; it seeks to establish patterned input when writing in Arabic, such as a semantic transfer from English to Arabic and literal translation. Second, the paper discusses those areas of the Arabic language that challenge the students’ inability to provide a correct TL (Target Language) output on the levels of morpho-syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Third, the paper argues for the importance of teaching the rudiments of translation at the early stages of language learning. Hence, it proposes solutions and empirical strategies to reducing the students’ reliance on translation by, for instance, educating them about the translation process, and by designing guided writing tasks with rehearsed structures, and without discouraging creativity.