Classroom Translation: The Case of Iranian University Students

Translation research has been of interest to both practitioners and theoreticians in the field. As far as the practical side of the coin is concerned, translation problems have been studied with an eye to the role of inter-lingual and intra-lingual transfer. The research reported here was an attempt to understand the nature of translation problems of Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, three cohorts of EFL learners taking introductory and advanced translation courses (from English to Persian and vice versa) participated in the study in order to identify the sources of their translation problems and offer solutions for the betterment of the situation. The content analysis of the samples of translation activities of the participants reveals that translation is a more sophisticated skill than expected and that an inappropriate linguistic competence in English is responsible for the bulk of translations blunders made by learner translators.