A Glossary Of Literary Terms Ninth Edition
Yi Pressimone
The best-selling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (formerly the Concise dictionary) provides clear, concise, and often witty definitions of the most troublesome literary terms from abjection to zeugma. Now available in a new, fully updated and expanded edition, it offers readers increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, and schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction.
It includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated and extended advice on recommended further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. New to this fully revised edition are recommended entry-level web links. Boasting over 1,200 entries, it is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language.
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This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
The print version of this handbook is distributed to all CCHS students in ninth grade. It is designed to be a companion for all English courses at CCHS, beginning with freshman year as students are introduced to the various literary genres.
CHARACTER: A person (sometimes a group of people, an animal, or a physical force) invented by an author who has an impact on the outcome of the story. Character motivation must be consistent; the character must be convincing and lifelike.
UNITY OF ACTION: The plot has unity if it is a single, complete, and ordered action in which none of the parts is unnecessary. The parts are so closely connected that without one of the parts the work would be disjointed.
SURPRISE: Surprise occurs when the events that occur in a literary work violate the expectations we have formed. The interplay between suspense and surprise is a prime source of the power of plot
PERSONAL ESSAY: the author assumes a tone of intimacy with his audience, tends to deal with everyday things rather than with public affairs or specialized topics, and writes in a relaxed, self-revelatory, and often whimsical fashion
POETRY is a patterned form of verbal or written expression of ideas in concentrated, imaginative and rhythmical terms. Poetry often contains rhyme and a specific meter, but not necessarily.
CONSONANCE: It is the repetition of consonant sounds within a line of verse. Consonance is similar to alliteration except consonance does not limit the repeated sound to the initial letter of a word; the repetition generally occurs at the ends of syllables.
APPROXIMATE RHYME (SLANT RHYME): two words that have some sounds in common but not enough to make them a perfect rhyme; often the words are spelled the same but pronounced differently.
SESTINA: A sestina is composed of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (three-line stanza). The end words used in each line of the first stanza repeat in a rolling pattern in the following stanzas; these same words are used two-to-a-line in the tercet.
CATHARSIS: It is a purging of emotion that occurs at the end of a tragedy as the audience feels pity and fear for the tragic hero; it is supposed to inspire the audience members to lead better lives.
CHORUS: This group, which sings the odes in the Greek plays, serves as a narrator to comment on the action from the perspective of the common man. Originally the chorus consisted of 12 men; Sophocles expanded it to 15, including the choragos (the chorus leader who interacts directly with other actors).
The focus of the present product oriented, qualitative and quantitative thesis was to identify the type and the most used translation strategies while rendering English literary technical terms into Persian, based on Baker's (1992) taxonomy. For the purpose of this study, "A Glossary Of Literary Terms" by Abrams (2008), and its translation "فرهنگ توصیفی اصطلاحات ادبی" by Sabzian (2009), were selected as the corpora of the study. For the next step, all of the 228 main entries of the mentioned book and their first Persian equivalents were extracted and analyzed to see which Baker's (1992) translation strategies have been applied by the renderer to translate the entries, then the frequency and percentage of the most used translation strategies were calculated. Research findings showed that the translator used 5 strategies in rendering the entries and the mostly used strategy was "translation by a more general word (superordinate)" (69.29%), and the least used strategy was "translation by paraphrase using related words" (0.87%).
Translation plays an important role in the modern world. Chute believes that "Without translation, our world would narrow mercilessly" (cited in Miremadi, 1991, p. 21). Newmark defines translation as "a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message and/or statement in one language by the same message and/or statement in another language" (Newmark, 1981).
Finding equivalents to transfer the same meaning of a source language (S L) text in a target language (TL) is not always an easy task.According to Catford (1987), translation is the replacement of a textual material in one language (SL) by an equivalent textual material in another language (TL).
Nida and Taber (1982:12) see translating as a process of reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the SL messages first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style. In other words translation is a transfer of meaning, message andstyle from oneSL textto the TL text. In the orderof priority, style is putthe last.Here the things to reproduce (transfer) is stated, message.
Translators use different frameworks to translate specialized terminology. The present research was going to identify the most frequent Baker's strategies applied by Saeed Sabzian Morad Abadi in for rendering the 9th edition of "A Glossary Of Literary Terms" compiled and written by Meyer Howard Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2008), published by Rahnama (2009). The above mentioned glossary contains specialized words and their equivalents related to literary technical terms.
Newmark (1991: 27) defines the act of translating briefly. It is the act of transferring meaning of a stretch or a unit of language, the whole or a part, from one language to another. According to the purpose, translation can be divided into four types: pragmatic, aesthetic-poetic, ethnographic, and linguistic translation (Brislin, 1976: 3-4). Pragmatic translation is the translation of a message with an interest in accuracy of the information meant to be communicated in the TL form. Belonging to such translation is the translation of technical information, such as repairing instructions. The second type is aesthetic-poetic translation that does not only focus on the information, but also the emotion, feeling, beauty involved in the original writing. The third is ethnographic translation that explicates the cultural context of the SL and TL versions. The last type is linguistic translation, the one that is concerned with equivalent meanings of the constituent morphemes of the TL and with grammatical form.
A translator, in order to translate technical specialized terms, should have a great knowledge of the field of those terms in addition to the knowledge of the ST and the TT writing systems, and should follow some principles to be sure that he/she rendered the terms correctly or not.According to Krings (1986: 263-275) or Lorscher (1996: 76-81) translation strategies are usually defined as the procedures leading to the optimal solution of a translation problem.
A translator uses a strategy when he/she encounters a problem while translating a text. Krings (1986:18) defines translation strategy as "translator's potentially conscious plans for solving concrete translation problems in the framework of a concrete translation task".
Sabzian (2009). The book contains technical terms for the Persian speaking students, researchers, and lexicographers in the field of literature. It was beyond the scope of this study to analyze the whole text of the book, so the researcher only concentrated on the translation of the main entries which are used by literature specialists and students as keywords.
In this process, the researcher investigated Baker's taxonomy on the translation of the entries of the book and their equivalents but not the explanations. The researcher asked two raters to evaluate the equivalents on the basis of Baker's strategies for more reliable statistics.
The significance of this study was to analyze what Baker's translation strategies were mostly applied by the translator in translating the literary technical terms of Abrams's "A Glossary Of Literary Terms" (2008).
The findings of this research will be useful for technical translators, lexicographers and students of translation studies. Moreover, individuals who are interested in translation may be motivated and would gain ideas about the translation strategies and the reasons of why those strategies were used.
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