Abstract:
To produce an adequate translation, language students are required to learn varieties of language features including syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Considering the curriculum language learners are face with, one can claim that almost all language students in Iran are taught these features in their academic settings including linguistic courses. Yet, there are some aspects of language which are disregarded in course books and syllabi and ignored by language teachers. Thus, language learners find it a formidable task to deal with these shrugged off aspects of their curricula. Genre of language is among these invisible features which have challenged translation students in translating specific texts. News reports is one of these genres that Iranian media translators, in spite of enjoying technical competence in language, are not familiar with knowledge and rhetorical conventions of it. So, the current is conducted to investigate the familiarity of these translators with genre features of news discourse and examine the effect of raising genre awareness on developing the quality of translation. To this aim, fourteen translation students studying translation for media purpose were selected through convenient sampling who were given some news reports to translate. Using Baker’s taxonomy (1992) and House’s quality assessment model (1997), the quality of their translations were assessed before genre awareness raising session and after it. The findings showed that the quality of translation ameliorated meaningfully after the instruction, indicating the importance of genre knowledge in linguistic competence. These findings have implications for syllabus designers and EAP and ESP teachers and students.
Machine summary:
Considering this importance, a new line of research came on the scene to find a solution to problems associated with rhetorical patterns of discourse which was called genre analysis aiming at raising students’ awareness of how producers of professional genres resort to certain linguistic conventions, how they share both conceptual and contextual background knowledge with their readers that facilitates the encoding/decoding of information, and how writers project their social identities in the text either explicitly or implicitly (Pltridge, 2000; Swales, 2004 ).
Flying in the face of such routines, many researchers have considered the role and importance of genre in teaching translation for a variety of reasons (Bell, 1991; Duff, 1989; Hatim & Mason, 1997).
However, in systemic functional linguistics the term genre refers to language use as a staged, purposeful activity that integrates Field, Tenor and Mode choices in a predictable way and in doing so, it performs certain social goals (Halliday & Martin, 1993).
The adopted models for translation analysis of the present research embrace genre and rhetorical features of translated tasks, as well as other linguistic features of texts, as depicted in the following section.
4. Results and Discussion The first question of the research investigated whether Iranian students of news translation are familiar with rhetorical conventions of their own genre.
Qualitative Results Obtained from Applying House’s (1997) Model (before intervention) Field Tenor Mode Genre As it can be seen in the tables 1, 2 and 3, there were some quantitative and qualitative mismatches between source text and target text translated by participants before the intervention.