Political Terms by APLL: Issues of Terminology Implantation and ‎Acceptability

Introduction

Today the languages of the advanced countries alongside their science and technology are disseminated all over the world. Accordingly, the scientifically and technologically less developed countries are dogged by some thorny linguistic problems in expressing new concepts since the words for these concepts are lacking in their languages. Elite members of a speech community have to get used to coping with a growing number of specialized texts. They continually hear about new discoveries, their knowledge is constantly expanded and unprecedented events take place every day; therefore, they need to have at their disposal new words that express these new concepts and situations. Terminologies have rapidly developed over the last decades and scholars have paid increasing attention to them. Hence, the language planners have a huge responsibility to produce the required scientific materials in this regard in their native language.

The communication of specialized knowledge and information is irretrievably bound up with the creation and dissemination of terminological resources and with terminology management in the widest sense of the word. In addition, the key role of terminology in the production and dissemination of documents is obvious and the efficiency of communication can be improved by choosing appropriate terminology. In translating specialized texts, problems of neologism that is a word that refers to a newly coined word usually identifying a new concept (Crystal, 2008) occur at the language interfaces where concepts are to be transferred from a source language into a target language. In order to establish and continue communicating with other speech communities, individuals of a society require a language that can, as a useful instrument, provide them with their linguistic needs; thus, it seems essential to set up a proper program of language planning in the speech community to assist the act of communication.

This paper on the one hand investigates the implantation that is as Quirion (2003, p. 32) puts it “… particular stage of a terminology management program where terminologies put forward by governmental language agencies start being used…” and is measured by “the sum of the coefficients of the word forms that make up that vocabulary compared to the sum of the coefficients of their alternate word forms” of the Political Science terminology approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL) in Hamshahri corpus (a corpus made up of news text from Hamshahri newspaper)and on the other hand the extent of acceptability of them among the MA students of the University of Isfahan (the rationale for choosing the students comes under the participant subsection on page 10).Central to the analysis is measuring the implantation coefficient (IC) of a group of terms that have competing terms and then addressing the question of whether there is a significant difference among these students in case of accepting these words. The objectives are to find the reasons why these terms have high or low IC or are acceptable or not. Hence the following research questions are addressed:

1- To what extent are the political science terms approved by APLL and their competing terms used in the Hamshahri corpus?

2- To what extent are the political science terms approved by APLL acceptable for MA English Translation, Political Science, and English Literature students?

3- Are there any correlations between the major of these three groups and their attitude about APLL-approved neologisms?

Background

In our globalized contemporary society – where science, technology, and cultural aspects are constantly evolving into more complex and particular forms – all kinds of information or new achievements rapidly spread all over the world, consolidating contacts and relations among different countries and peoples. As a result of this communication, the scientifically and technologically developed and less developed countries exposed to English are confronted with serious linguistic problems in expressing a number of new concepts for which no terms exist in their language. Such a phenomenon engages the language planners with providing the consumers with scientific materials in their native language. As such, certain actions must be taken to meet this communicative need of such nations. It can be claimed, then, that the guarantee for survival of a language may be supplying it with new terminologies either by coining (neologisms), or as stated by Kristiansen and Andersen (2012, p. 44) by “alternative strategies include the borrowing of existing terms, usually from English, or various types of secondary term formation, i.e., the creation of new terms for known concepts…. These include loans, calques, or other adaptations”. The concern with the problems of the new words entering a language calls language academies into existence. They are bodies intended to make principal decisions about language use, mostly in relation to corpus policy, i.e. the correct forms to be used, grammar, lexicon and other decisions about how languages should be used (Shohamy, 2006). Edwards (2009) defines language academies as: “learned institutions, found in most countries or national regions, charged particularly with the definition, the protection, the purity and the enhancement of the national language” (p. 257).

Language academies have various goals; however, they are mostly responsible for introducing new words, imposing and promoting official policies, guarding against foreign terms intrusion and serving as the final and most authoritative word on how languages should be used (Fishman, 2000). Despite the fact that language academies have the authority to renew foreign words not existing in the language and give national flavor to them, the influence they have on actual language use and actual speech of people is not clear (Shohamy, 2006).One role of the language academies is to manage terminology planning even if the speech community chooses to overlook some of their pronouncements. Terminology committees are commonly central circles of language academies and other language promotion agencies. They face, as Fishman (2006) shows, ideological as well as practical problems in developing new terminology in a language to handle the new concepts, techniques, and devices resulting from modernization and the inter-cultural contact of a globalizing world. Therefore, an innovation will not be permanent unless the members of a speech community view their language as a malleable resource (Sanches, Blount, & Gumperz, 1975). In reality, individuals of a speech community or a particular field of study show specific linguistic behavior to the translations made for the neologisms. To put it mildly, they act arbitrarily in accepting the new words coined by the language planners or translators. While adopting some of them, they may either reject the rest or use the borrowed terms instead. Therefore, promotion of awareness about terminology should be undertaken among the academic societies such as professional associations, and translator associations in order for these people to accept and use them in order to meet their linguistic needs.

In much the same way, lack of terminology in a language may cause speakers to choose another, better equipped one. Hence, terminology planning is one of the most critical factors of success in language planning (Fishman, 1983). In practice, however, the people attempting to develop new lexicon are commonly either members of the educated elite, not necessarily sensitive to public feelings, or leading to equal isolation, active leaders of the national-language reform movement. As a result, the process regularly leads to notorious failures (Spolsky, 2009).

In Iran, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature equips the Persian language with new words coping with a massive influx of new concepts in science and technology. The Third Academy was established after the Third Supreme Council of the Iranian Revolution in 1990.It has issued eleven lists of Collection of Terms Approved thus far. The first collection was published in 2003 and the last one in 2014.On its website (www.Persianacademy.ir), the academy has laid down a statute with the following goals:

• · Maintaining the strength and originality of the Persian language, which is one of the pillars of Iranian national identity, the Second Language of the Islamic world and the carrier of Islamic Education and Culture;
• · Cultivating refined and expressive language to present scientific, and literary ideas, as well as creating intimacy between historical education, and current generation plus future generations;
• · Diffusing Persian language and literature and expanding its territory inside and outside the country;
• · Injecting vitality and development into the Persian language to meet the requirements of time and human life and the advancement of science and technology, while maintaining its authenticity.

APLL’s approved terms have been investigated by different people in Iran and a great deal of research has been conducted on neologisms and borrowings (loan and calque) internationally. Quirion (2003) proposed an ideal protocol for measuring terminology usage that involves using appropriate corpus and based on this protocol “any attempt to measure terminology implantation must be based on the institutional communications” (p. 30). “The term implantation was preferred to implementation to refer to that particular stage of a terminology management program where terminologies put forward by governmental language agencies start being used” (Quirion, 2003, p.45). As he states the calculation of IC is the way to measure the acceptability of the reference terms (terms approved by the official institutions). “A given term and its synonyms in one language are considered as competitors, as well as their equivalents in another language” (p.46). Although measuring IC can be fruitful, for words without competing terms it cannot be calculated and Quirion (2003, p.46) states “… the word forms having no competing terms and terms that are morphologically similar across different languages are treated separately from the other terms …. Word forms having no competing forms are readily implanted into the language; they are therefore classified separately”. Although this protocol can be an ideal, in situations that no competitors exist it is not possible to measure implantation and it seems that acceptability could be investigated by using the instruments such as questionnaires. Another limitation is appropriate available corpus. In these situations using available corpora are unavoidable.

Quirion and Lanthier (2006) employed the protocol for the synchronic measurement of written institutional documents of two fields of transportation and retirement and pension. Then by calculating the IC of the sample terms they proved that four characteristics of the terms including: conciseness, absence of competing terms, derivative form capability, and compliance with the rules of the language, that have been proposed in the previous studies to be influential on terms acceptability causes the terms to have IC of one (high acceptability).

In another study Karabacak (2009) has investigated the use of economic terms that were made official by the Turkish Language Society (TDK) in Turkish newspapers. His findings indicated that the writers of the newspaper articles use the official terms less frequently than loan terms in their articles and proposed more effort “to invent more acceptable terms and to find efficient ways of implementing their use” (p. 145). Kristiansen and Andersen (2012) have studied “the emergence of the new concepts and their designations in corpora representing the Norwegian language” (p. 43) and referred to the usefulness of corpus-based studies “to illustrate the dynamics of term formation and different strategies adopted in the designation of new concepts” (p. 44). In another study Kristiansen (2012) has used web-based corpora to find Norwegian particular financial neologies and her findings indicated that in the corpora investigated in addition to the anglicisms, many calques and Norwegian equivalents exist that can be very fruitful for addition to the traditional textbooks.

Most of the research-on-neologisms in Iran have focused on the verification of the APLL approved terms, especially the general terms and all of them used questionnaire for data gathering. However, few studies have been conducted on the specialized terms of different fields of study and none of them used a corpus for this purpose. The following is a review of the previous studies in Iran:

Gandomi (2001), in her MA thesis, has examined the causes of unacceptability of these coinages and has introduced some solutions. Using questionnaires, she lists a number of reasons why these coinages are not acceptable to people and why some of them are proper equivalents while others are not. Simplicity, euphoniousness, and easy pronunciation are some of the features of proper equivalents, while low acceptability of a word and lack of awareness of people of a coinage are regarded as characteristics of poor equivalents.

Ahmadipour (2006), in her PhD dissertation, has examined the most important non-linguistic factors influencing the acceptance of neologisms approved by the APLL among Persian speakers in Iran. Following Robert Leon Cooper’s model (1984), four variables of adoption are introduced: 1- awareness, 2- evaluation, 3- knowledge, and 4- usage. These notions refer to different stages involved in the process of adoption of innovations. This researcher found a relationship between the abovementioned variables and variables such as sex, age, and education. Ahmadipour discovered a significant relationship not only between awareness and knowledge, but also between evaluation and usage. Accordingly, she concluded that the Academy, as the main language planning organization, could promote the knowledge of adopters about the adoption of neologisms. In much the same way, the frequent usage of neologisms maybe increased by this institution through affecting the evaluation variable.

Mahmoodi (2009) in her MA thesis has investigated the application rate of APLL-coined terms compared to that of borrowed words in translation of technical terms using subjects with a PhD degree. She has also sought to find the probability of an existing relationship between the familiarity with APLL-coined terms, and their application rate in translating. Based on the findings of the study, she concludes that there is a significant difference between the frequency of the use of borrowed words and that of the words coined by APLL. She also concludes that the higher familiarity with the coinages results in more application of those words.

Aghili (2010) in his MA thesis has investigated the extent of transparency and acceptability of some of the APLL neologisms compared to that of borrowed words. He has also attempted to see whether there is any relationship between the level of education and field of study of the participants with the extent of transparency and acceptability of the neologisms. Based on the results, he concludes that having established themselves as part of the Persian language, borrowed words are regarded by language users as accepted Persian words. Therefore, these words have more acceptability and transparency for such language users than APLL-coined words.

Jamali (2011) has studied acceptability and application of the medical terms coined by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature among the students of medicine at the Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. In this study, the familiarity, application, and acceptability of the medical terms were studied regarding the factors of time, the word forms, and the differences between interns (junior students of medicine) and residents (senior students of medicine). Based on the findings, there was no significant difference between the residents and interns concerning the familiarity and application of medical terms. The old medical terms were more popular than new ones. She concludes that the more one is familiar with the coined medical terms, the more he/she will accept and use them.

Talebinejad, Vahid Dastjerdi, and Mahmoodi (2012) have compared the frequency of use of neologisms coined by the APLL and the borrowings. Their findings indicated that there was a positive correlation between familiarity with the neologisms and the frequency of their usage and they suggest the people familiarity rate should be enhanced in any way possible.

As mentioned above, there are few studies on specialized terms introduced by the APLL into the Persian language. Therefore, this study is an attempt to contribute to this under-researched area by investigating the acceptability of the terms approved in the field of Political Science by different groups of students in some majors that are supposed to deal with these terms more. In addition, it seeks to measure the IC of the terms with competitors in Hamshahri corpus and then to find the reasons why these terms have high or low implantation coefficient.

Method

The researchers have used the Hamshahri corpus for gathering data about the reference terms and competing ones and survey method for data collection about the reference terms without competing terms. What follows is an account of the procedures for the selection of participants and the way the materials and questionnaire were implemented. Before more information about the participants and material is provided some of the key terms used are defined. Acceptability is the first one. Acceptable was defined by Richards and Schmidt (2002, p. 3) as:

“The judgment by the native speakers/ users of a speech variety that a certain linguistic item is possible in their variety. The linguistic item could be a written sentence, a spoken utterance, a particular syntactic structure, a word or a way of pronouncing a certain sound. The speech community where such an item is considered acceptable could be all the speakers of a particular region or social class or, alternatively, just the members of an in-group.”

The way that acceptability is investigated in this research is two-faceted: firstly by measuring the frequency and the IC of the selected terms and secondly through the students’ attitude about the terms. The second key term is neologism and it is a word that refers to a newly coined word usually identifying a new concept (Crystal, 2008) and in this research it refers to a newly coined term introduced by APLL for a concept in English language with no equivalent in Persian. The third one is a political term which is a term classified explicitly by the APLL under the terms belonging to the political sciences.

Participants

The participants in this study were 90 adult male and female graduates at the University of Isfahan. They were selected from among the available MA students of English Translation Studies, English Literature, and Political Science. These students were chosen purposively because the available MA classes in University of Isfahan included more or less the same number of the students we need. The subjects were well qualified to be involved in this study. The characteristics of these groups, as well as the criteria and rationales for the involvement of them are explained below. The students of ETS had passed almost all their translation courses prior to participating in this study, whether at undergraduate or graduate level. A typical BA or MA curriculum for ETS in Iranian universities includes courses such as theories of translation, translation skills and techniques, translation as a profession (translating different kinds of specialized texts including political science ones), morphology, etc. It is noteworthy that all of the MA students of ETS had received their Bachelor’s degrees in translation studies too. Since the courses passed at the undergraduate level are important for purposes of this study, the students who had done their Bachelor’s program in fields other than translation studies were excluded. Similarly, the PS students had passed all their English courses including General English, and English Political Texts in their undergraduate degree program, and Specialized English (1) and (2) as two graduate level courses. The rationale for their involvement in this study was that highly specialized scholarly texts are best translated by scholars with a background in the field. Although, these scholars might have gained experience in their studies and turned to translate for professional reasons, they may lack competence and experience in the process of translating. On the other hand, even if they have never had experience in translating a specialized text, they are still the target text receivers, and their agreement with the equivalences proposed for the terms in their field of study is very important. Therefore, in this study, the MA students of PS were chosen as a group since they were regarded as specialists in their field. Finally, the rationale for choosing MA students of EL was the fact that they are not often occupied with translating texts. It would be better to say that they are hardly involved in translating specialized texts. Accordingly, the researchers also asked the MA students of EL whether they had any course for translating political texts, and in the case they passed the course in previous semesters, they were excluded .The researchers assumed that they differ from ETS and PS students in that they might take a different attitude toward the Persian equivalents and this group can function as a control group.

Materials

The material used for this study was a list of English Political terms along with their Persian equivalents and definitions which were collected from the website of Academy of Persian Language and Literature (http://Persianacademy.ir). This institute, with the aim of proposing equivalents for new terms in different scientific fields, has published 11 volumes which include English scientific terms as well as their Persian equivalents and definitions. Nine volumes (namely volume 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11) include 765 political terms. 

After collecting these terms, the researchers checked their frequency on Persian Language Data Base (PLDB) Website (www.pldb.ihcs.ac.ir), one of the largest Persian language corpora. Then, after having categorized these terms into two groups on the basis of their frequencies (more frequent words vs. less frequent words), the researchers have selected 60 terms through proportionate sampling. Since these neologisms were without context, there might be a possibility that they were ambiguous for the respondents. Therefore, it was decided that their definitions would be collected and included in the questionnaire. In addition, for 27 terms with competing alternates the implantation coefficients (ICs) were calculated. For calculating IC the formula in figure 1 was used. The number of occurrences of term T in the corpus is divided by the number of occurrences of this term and its competing term(s). Examples of calculating ICs were provided in results section.

Figure 1. The Formula of Calculating IC (taken from Quirion 2003, p. 33)

Resource and Instrument

The resource for the data collection in this study was Hamshahri corpus used for compiling the frequency of 27 terms that have competing terms. According to AleAhmad et al. (2009) Hamshahri corpus was created by downloading the online news from the website of Hamshahri newspaper that since 1996 has presented its archive to the public through its website (http://www.hamshahri.net/). The documents in this corpus are news articles from 1996 to 2007 that have been categorized in 82 different subjects including political pieces of text that have the tag ‘siasi’ means political.

Another resource was the website of Academy of Persian Language and Literature (http://Persianacademy.ir).

The instrument employed was a questionnaire which was developed to examine the acceptability of equivalents proposed for the Political Science terms by the Persian Academy. It contained English terms along with their Persian definitions. These definitions were collected from the Website of the Persian Academy (www.persianacademy.ir) and put in a column of the questionnaire in order to avoid any ambiguity, and to clarify what the English term was about (appendix 2). Participants responded to 60 items, indicating their level of agreement with each item on a Likert Scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

Finally, there was also an open-ended question in the last part of this survey in order to gather some information about the reasons why the respondents agree or disagree with the items they had considered. This question allows respondents to put forward their ideas about the items in their own words.

Pilot Test

This survey was pilot tested to ensure that the constructs or questionnaire items addressed what was intended to be measured and to ensure the general clarity of the questions. To this end, 15 BA students of English translation who were taking their second semester of their junior year took part in the piloting. The content and face validity were determined by the professors of the foreign languages faculty of Isfahan university (experts’ judgments). The acquired value of r = 0.896 indicated that the questionnaire has high index of reliability.

Results

This section deals with the data obtained from the calculation of IC and the questionnaire. The results of calculating ICs provide the answer to the first research question: to what extent are the political science terms approved by APLL and their competing terms used in the Hamshahri corpus?

As an example, the equivalent proposed by the APLL for ‘capitulation’ is ‘qezāvatsepāri’, which has the competing term ‘kāpitolāsion’. In the corpus no occurrence of the proposed term was observed but the competing term has the frequency of 113 and therefore it has zero implantation coefficient, i.e. = 0.Another term was ‘eqtedār= authority’ with the frequency of 4716 and the competing term is ‘ātority’ with the frequency of 55 and the IC of 0.99, i.e. .In Appendix 1 (Table1) the list of the terms, their frequencies, the frequency of their competing terms, and their ICs can be found.

If the implantation coefficients of the terms are considered, conciseness seems to be an influential factor on high IC. Among 27 approved terms, seven terms have IC higher than 0.5 and except one (divānsālāri means bureaucracy) none of them are compounds. Out of these seven terms, five terms with IC higher than 0.7 are simple words. Almost all of the terms with IC lower than 0.5 are made of two words. Some of them are derived forms of the simple terms (with high IC), e.g. ‘eqtedārgorizi’ and ‘eqtedārgoriz’ have zero IC but ‘eqtedār’ has IC of 0.99.This interesting point needs more attention that although a term can be acceptable, it does not mean the derived terms have the same feature. Thus, it seems conciseness to be influential on the acceptance of the terms under scrutinizing.

Another feature of the terms with high IC is their capability to be used in other derived forms. It seems that when a term is long or is made of two parts, adding other prefixes and suffixes to it makes its processing more difficult and the language users do not accept it easily. It seems that one of the factors that APLL experts did not take into account when proposing the equivalents is introducing the terms with two or more parts and these extra parts are used to express the concept behind a prefix or a suffix. It seems that using affixation rather than compounding can remove some of the problems.

In order to answer the second question of the research (To what extent are the political science terms approved by APLL acceptable for MA English Translation, Political Science, and English Literature students?) the data in the questionnaire was employed. Information obtained from the first section of the questionnaire showed that 58% of the selected participants were male, and 42% were female students. In addition, the mean age of all respondents was 27 years. The frequency distributions of the answers to the questions, as well as the percentage of the selection are shown in figure 1. Note that this distribution is for the data gathered from the whole sample.

Figure 1.Frequency Distribution and Percentage of the Answers of the Whole Sample

Figure 1 summarizes the percentage of selection for the 5-point Likert scale (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree and strongly agree) of the questionnaire, filled out by all the respondents. Of the 90 respondents, only 6% strongly disagreed with the Persian equivalents of political terms, proposed by the APLL. In addition, 20% of them have selected the disagree choice. The sum of these two choices indicates that 26% of the respondents disagree with these equivalents. In contrast, around 40% of the respondents have chosen the agree choice. Of these respondents, 19% strongly have agreed with the neologism proposed by the Persian Language Academy in the field of political science. Therefore, around 59% have agreed or strongly agreed with these equivalents. However, 15% took a neutral position on the items of the questionnaire.

To answer the second research question, the researchers, after calculating frequency distribution of the responses for each group, conducted crosstabs to see the extent to which respondents of these groups agreed with the equivalents in the questionnaire (see Appendix 1: Table 2). Then, to answer the third question, the results were analyzed using statistical tests including chi-square test and Cramer’s V (see Appendix 1: Tables3 and 4).

Table 2 (see Appendix 1) describes percentages of the population who agreed or disagreed with the questionnaire items, or stood neutral about them. The responses were reduced from five to three by combining the two agreement (strongly agree and agree) and disagreement options into one. A total of 64% of ETS students considered these words to be acceptable, while 23% of them disagreed with them. These percentages indicated that around two third of the sample of ETS students agreed with the political terms introduced by the Persian Academy. In this group, those who were neutral about the items amounted to 13%. However, around 50% of the PS students agreed with these words, whereas around 30% disagreed with them. These values showed that half of the political science students agreed with the political terms introduced by the APLL. The rest of the PS respondents adopted a neutral position equaling 20%.Finally, as for the EL students participating in this study, the extent of acceptability of the APLL-approved terms amounted to 63%.However, about 24% of these respondents disagreed with the items, and 13% stood neutral.

After analyzing the data gathered from each group and tabulating them, the researchers compared these groups to see if there was a significant difference in terms of accepting the political terms approved by the APLL. Therefore, a chi-square test was employed to determine whether there is a significant difference between the expected frequencies and the observed frequencies in the groups, that is, to see whether groups differ in their level of agreement with items (see Appendix1: Table 3). Cramer’s V is employed to measure the strength of the association between the fields of study and the attitude scales. Using the Chi-Square (value of 92.000, p= 0.000 < 0.05), it was revealed that the attitudes of the three groups of respondents in selecting the options differ significantly in terms of accepting the APLL-approved political science terms (see Appendix1: Table 3). In other words, it was concluded that at a 5% level of significance, there is correlation between the level of agreement and the major.

Cramer’s V test was also carried out to show the strength of relationship between these two variables. The test result with value of 0.092 (which varies between 0 and 1), p= 0.000 < 0.05, indicated a weak correlation between the major and attitude. In addition, the significance level= 0.000, which is highly significant p < 0.05, means the relationship is generalizable to the population (see Appendix1: Table 4).

As pointed out in the instruments section, the third part of the questionnaire contained an open-ended question where respondents could provide a response in their own words. In this part they were supposed to list their reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with the items they had just responded. More than half of the respondents (47 respondents out of 90, 53%) answered this open-ended question. In the following paragraphs, the major themes emerged from the answers are provided for each group in detail.

More than half of the ETS students (57%, 17/30) answered the third part of the survey where 82% (n=14) of them spoke about transparency of the terms. In other words, the more transparent these terms were, the more acceptable they would be. Morphological well-formedness were another common theme raised by these respondents to demonstrate the acceptability of the terms (64%, n=11).

Almost half of the PS students (53%, 16/30) answered this part of the survey. Around 69% (n=11) of these students offered an answer to the effect that they did not know that the APLL had also considered Political Science terms. Further, they said they had never heard of some of these terms before. Again the most prevalent theme raised included the transparency of meaning of these neologisms. Around 75% of the PS respondents reported that the borrowed terms with adapted Persian pronunciations transfer the concepts better than the APLL-approved neologisms. Other factors including conciseness, frequency, as well as simplicity were suggested for the language planners by these students. These respondents stated that technical dictionaries are the main sources to refer to when translating the technical terms encountered in their technical books. As they put it, technical dictionaries are not in agreement with the APLL policies, because of employing more borrowed terms than their Persian translations.

Less than half of the EL students (46%, 14/30) responded to this part of the survey where 71% (n=10) of them said that they did not agree that those terms lack transparency. Similarly, these respondents stated that they were in favor of those terms being morphologically well-formed; otherwise they would not accept them.

Disussion

In the first part of this research, the implantation coefficients of the terms indicate that conciseness was a reason for high acceptance of the terms and the PS students have mentioned this point when they express their reason for preferring the terms proposed by APLL. By analyzing the answers provided in the third part of the questionnaire, which asked the respondents why they agree or disagree with the APLL-approved political terms, it can be concluded that conciseness and transparency, morphological well-formedness, and familiarity with terms were the main reasons for agreeing with the items, or otherwise. According to the findings of this study, it could be inferred that if the concept of technical terms is clear to the ETS and EL students, they might prefer using Persian terms instead of borrowings in their translations. The justification for this claim is that the analyses of the open-ended question of the survey showed these students agree with those terms that best represent the meaning of the definition provided in the questionnaire. This does not accord with the results of the study of Aghili (2010) who has investigated the extent of transparency and acceptability of some of the APLL-approved general neologisms compared to that of borrowed words. In his study, Aghili found that APLL-coined general words are less transparent and acceptable to English students since they are much more exposed to original texts; therefore, the borrowed terms are more acceptable to them than APLL neologisms.

Another reason given by the ETS and EL students in the third section of the questionnaire was that these students also prefer well-formed Persian terms to borrowings, while rejecting those terms that are not in keeping with Persian word formation rules. This idea is in line with the findings of Quirion and Lanthier (2006) that mention compliance with the rules of the language as an important factor in implantation. The ETS students also agreed with those terms having been approved as a result of prompt actions taken by the APLL, before the corresponding borrowed terms were institutionalized. The English proverb best explains this issue: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. It can be concluded that the APLL should keep a watchful eye on the new science and technologies developed throughout the world. In addition to that, it should take immediate actions prior to the intrusion of foreign terms along with these technologies into the Persian language. However, when asking for the reasons why they do not accept some of the APLL-approved terms, most of the PS students answered that they are not familiar with some of these equivalents that seem to be the same obstacle mentioned by Karabacak (2009). It seems that using these terms more frequently in the media can increase the familiarity and usage of these terms. Also PS students believe that these approved terms are less transparent than borrowings and usually cannot transfer the same meaning as the borrowings do. According to PS students who took part in this study, technical dictionaries are used as the first sources in translating the technical terms of their books; these dictionaries prefer and use the borrowed terms and this important point leads to the institutionalization of borrowings instead of APLL-approved equivalents. Thus as a solution, the editors of technical dictionaries should be informed to employ the APLL approved terms too.

Conclusion

Based on the results of this study, it is fair to suggest that in coining new terms, itis better that the APLL considers not only the linguistic aspects, but also the informative aspects central to information communication. It seems that the dictionary development and those involved in this industry should be informed about these terms and they should be asked to put these terms in the dictionaries.

Moreover, as the participants put it, most of the times a single Persian word cannot convey the information embedded in the technical terms. This is an important point: it seems difficult and sometimes impossible that the whole concept behind one term will be represented in a single term in another language due to some cultural limitations but when the speakers accept one specific term they should be aware of these differences.

Another subsidiary finding was that most of the participants were not familiar with the APLL-coined equivalents that appeared for the first time in the news. So it seems fair to suggest that the APLL-coined political terms are better to be applied in the news broadcast several times a day. In addition, these terms can also be used in those newspapers enjoying mass daily circulation. Political experts who take part in the political TV talk shows can play a leading role in institutionalizing these terms in the Persian society. Moreover, government and education authorities have a big part in diffusing newly coined words of the APLL. For instance, these terms can be introduced by relevant educational organizations to students at universities through political science teachers. This Academy can send the approved terms to universities, or introduce them to the scientific journals so that these words are diffused across academic society.

Further studies can be conducted on the implantation and acceptability of the terms proposed for different fields of study. It is suggested that further researches employ other instrumentations such as test or interview with experts in the fields, in order to assess the acceptability of the APLL-approved terms. Finally, studies can be done on the correlation between the word-formation rules employed andthe higher implantation coefficient.

Appendix 1

Table 1. List of the APLL Approved Terms, their Frequencies, the Frequency of their Competing Terms, and their Implantation Coefficient

Table 2. Crosstabulation of Options and Groups

Table 3. Chi-Square Tests

Table 4. Symmetric Measures

Appendix 2

The quesionaire

In God We Trust

Dear respondent, this questionnaire consists of 60 political science terms along with their equivalents approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL). Based on the definitions provided, please select one of the choices to show how you feel about the APLL’s equivalents. Thank you in advance for participating in this survey.

Graduate major:                                                 Undergraduate major:                                 Age:                             Gender:

SD= strongly disagree; D= disagree; N= neutral; A= agree; SA= strongly agree