Abstract:
The main priority for university translation educators is to improve the quality and outcomes of translation courses. To achieve such a goal, the instructors are required to integrate learners' needs, identified with the help of a needs survey, into syllabus content. Accordingly, the present study was conducted to identify the Iranian English majors' difficulties in translating English texts since once a problem is identified, exploring the best pedagogical solutions would follow. The aim was accomplished through qualitative descriptive research conducted at Islamic Azad University, Shiraz Branch tracing the errors committed by the English majors in their exam papers in academic years 2016-2019. Following the model proposed by Miremadi (2008), the syntactic and lexical problems were identified in the exam papers collected during six semesters. Moreover, three more categories were added to the list as the data analysis moved forward: culture problems, stylistic problems, and miscellaneous errors with detailed subdivisions. What appeared to be worthy of attention in the results was the students' weakness in text and sentence segmentation to find the function of the components to approach textual meaning, resulting from the students' poor English language proficiency. The results also revealed the students' poor topical knowledge as well as the lack of knowledge of translation techniques and strategies.
Machine summary:
In a study conducted by Montasser Mohamed (2013) some practical lexical problems in English- Arabic translation confronted by undergraduate students were investigated.
In a study conducted to find out students’ main problems in translating from English into Persian, using Na Pham’s (2005) error analysis, Ardeshiri and Zarafshan (2014) found out that understanding the pragmatic senses was the most distinctive problem the students had, the main reason for which was misunderstanding the source text main message.
The results of a study conducted at Islamic Azad University, Salmas Branch to understand the nature of translation problems of Iranian EFL learners revealed that the biggest challenge the students faced was Persian-English translations since it was much easier to comprehend than to compose English.
This design, therefore, was chosen to investigate the hindrances or problems confronting the Iranian undergraduate students of translation when translating different texts from English into Persian by analyzing the errors they had made in their exam papers.
In terms of general categories of the problems, in fact, the results of the study are in line with other Iranian researchers such as Abbasi and Kariminia (2011) and Yousofi (2014), working on the university students' translation errors; however, the detailed subdivisions and the nature of problems are, in most cases, different from the other studies.
The data, including the above example, show most of the students' tendency to translate English passive sentences including agent by-phrase word by word using the Persian term توسط /tævæssot/ meaning by.
Conclusion The findings of the error analysis procedure indicated the syntactic, lexical, cultural, and stylistic problems the translation students face while translating different English texts into Persian.