Foreword

Abstract

Yet another year has come to its end. It brought us some new ideas and we have spent several months in preparations to realize them.

The greatest change is that we may be expecting the new ALA issue within a month, in January 2018 already. From the year to come, we will still be publishing two issues per year, with the winter issue published in January coming first. The second issue will be the summer issue, published in July. At this opportunity we would like to express our gratitude to all the authors in the ALA journal, and alongside send out our call for new articles.

All the rest of the changes might only be noticed by our regular readers, while newcomers will hopefully find our e-journal competent, functional, and user friendly.

This number of the ALA journal is mostly dedicated to the area of translation studies, however, also contains three interesting works on language.

Wing Bo Anna TSO in her work “Repressed Sexual Modernity: A Case Study of Herbert Giles’ (1845 - 1935) Rendition of Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880) in the Late Qing” attempts the literary-cultural approach and investigates the lost in translation. She focused on examining gender ideologies in the original and translated work to find out that transgressive gender views get strongly repressed in Giles’ English rendition.

A similar thought, namely the importance of the cultural background of the text in translation is stressed in the article “Metaphor in Translation: Cognitive Perspectives on Omar Khayyam’s Poetry as Rendered into English and Kurdish”, written by Rahman VEISI HASAR and Ehsan PANAHBAR. As metaphors as cognitive phenomena can not be relegated to linguistic expression only, the research findings reveal that translators have mostly been successful in translating metaphors dependent on shared cultural models, however, have failed to recreate metaphors dependent on non-shared cultural models.

Difficulties in translating metaphors were also experienced by Eva VUČKOVIČ and Byoung Yoong KANG, who in their article “Prevajanje Ko Unove poezije iz korejščine v slovenščino” address several major problems they have encountered when translating poetry from Korean into Slovene. The aricle is written in Slovene and is a pionieering work on translation studies from Korean into Slovene.

Lija GANTAR wrote an article “Ancient Greek Legend in Modern Japanese Literature: ‘Run, Melos!’ by Dazai Osamu” in which she discusses how the Japanese author managed to retell a Western literature story in a way to succesfully make it a part of the Japanese literature.

The following three articles refer to language. Sweta SINHA in her article “Fuzzy Logic Based Teaching/Learning of a Foreign Language in Multilingual Situations” managed to incorporate the concept of Fuzzy Logic (FL), which primarily gained momentum in the areas of artificial intelligence and allied researches, into a foreign language classroom. She describes language pedagogy as more real-like when observed through the lens of fuzzy logic and fuzzy thinking, and claims that in that way language interference is more of a resource than a challenge.

Now already a sequential work on adjective distribution was contributed by LI Wenchao, who wrote the article “Revisit Adjective Distribution in Chinese”. In it the author re-classifies Chinese monosyllabic adjectives and verbs in light of ‘scale structure’ and examines how various adjectives are associated with different scalar layers of verbs.  

Finally, an interesting project report on the development of  early Persian vocabulary in the process of first language acquisition was written by Hajar SHAHHOSEINI. The report is entitled “Investigation of Early Vocabulary Development of a Persian Speaking Child at Age 2 Years Old in Iran”.

Editors and Editorial Board thank all the contributors to this volume, and wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration.