Journal of Modern Languages

The Development of Paediatric Malay Matrix Sentence Test (PaedMalayMST) Materials through the Construction of a Paediatric Malay Corpus

Nur 'Azzah Zakaria — 2022-12-31

The selection of material is important in the development of a paediatric speech perception test. Even though several studies have documented various sources of speech testing materials, using corpus was recommended to develop a Matrix Sentence Test (MST). However, as available Malay corpus was limited to written words only, this research aims to construct a Paediatric Malay corpus from a combination of written and spoken words of children in Malaysia and to develop word-based matrix (WBM) for the Paediatric Malay Matrix Sentence Test (PaedMalayMST) based on the developed corpus. The WBM replicates the Malay grammatical structure in these three categories: number, object, and adjective. Based on these criteria, the words from the developed corpus were then filtered by considering the frequency of occurrences and its phonemic distributions to be included in the WBM. As a result, a matrix of three categories with six words for each category was constructed.

Female Sympathisers of ISIS as Muhajirahs in ISIS-Affiliated Media

Ungku Khairunnisa Ungku Mohd Nordin — 2022-12-31

International media have reported on the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS), an international terrorist organisation based in Syria and Iraq since 2014. Women, often young and unmarried, were leaving their homes and families to sneak into Syria and join ISIS, according to reports in the international media (Neumann, 2015). Sjoberg &Gentry (2011) assert that the media's portrayal of female terrorists and the factors that encourage women to support terrorist organisations have not been sufficiently investigated. This study examines the discursive strategies employed by ISIS-affiliated media outlets to represent female sympathisers as muhajirahs. Using Critical Discourse Analysis – the Discourse Historical Approach (Resigl, 2017), this paper will analyse the diverse and often contested ways in which the Self versus Other (Wodak, 2009) schemata is prominent in the representations of ISIS female sympathisers. The data were taken from ISIS-affiliated media, including the Manifesto from the Al Khannssa Brigade and six Dabiq magazines. This paper will focus on referential, predicational and argumentation strategies (topoi) in the selected ISIS-affiliated media. This paper intends to pave the way for an examination of gender and terrorism that explores the complexities of representations by examining gender through multiple lenses.

Subtitling Strategies and Translation Accuracy in the Malay to English Translation of “Ejen Ali: The Movie”

Pavithra Devi Batmanathan — 2022-12-31

Previous studies on audio-visual translation indicate that there is a gap in the exploration of translation strategies in the Malaysian movie subtitling context and the quality of Malay to English subtitle translations. This study aimed to explore the strategies used in the subtitle translations of the Malaysian movie Ejen Ali: The Movie and evaluate the accuracy level of the translations associated with the identified strategies. Ten translation strategies developed by Gottlieb (1992), and the parameter of “accuracy” was purposefully selected out of the three criteria of the translation quality assessment proposed by Nababan et al., (2012) as the theoretical framework of this study. The three main strategies used in the most accurate translations were “transfer”, “paraphrase”, and “expansion”. The subtitling of this movie was generally found accurate. In most of the accurate translations “transfer” strategy was utilized, whereas “dislocation” was identified in most of the inaccurate translations. Moreover, the findings revealed that there were inaccuracies in the translations which could have been avoided by using other relevant strategies. Gottlieb’s nine of 10 strategies (except transcription) in addition to the nine mixed strategies were identified and described in the process of analysis.

Characteristics of exocentric nominal compounds in Berom: A semantic view of the noun-verb agentive mwat tabak and mwat ha

Pam Marcus — 2022-12-31

Nominal compounds, which are very productive in Berom, are formed by combining the noun and verb constituents. The NV compounds are interpreted as the agent, location, or instrument based on the meaning of the existing nominal constituent. This study analyses the semantics of two types of Berom agentive compounds: mwat tabak ‘preacher, [literally, person shoot]’ and mwat ha ‘speaker, [literally, person talk]’. First, both words are realized from the NV structure and the agentive meaning of the compounds is derived from the interpretation of an unspecified N [mwat] that performs the action which is apparently expressed by the V constituent in mwat ha and an action that is not expressed by the V constituent in mwat tabak. Secondly, the two compounds lack the deverbal suffix such as the English -er that is usually attached to agentive nouns and as such they are both treated as compounds with different semantic realizations. The analyses show that the two constructions vary significantly not only in terms of semantics, but also in their specific role and interpretation of the action expressed by the verbal constituent. We argued that the agent nouns in the compounds employ diverse prosodic features such as tone and pitch, in the activity that the compound revealed. Consequently, we conclude that the meaning of agentive compounds in Berom may not necessarily be determined by the structural and semantic property of the compound but by the interaction between the constituents and the relevant context of usage.