Translations of Journalistic Texts in Iranian Undergraduate Students: An Error Analysis Approach

Abstract

Translating journalistic text has been one of the major courses in Iranian universities. The challenges hidden in translating journalistic texts motivated the present study to investigate the translation of such texts. Thus, this research makes an attempt to identify and categorize the probable errors and to distinguish the most frequent ones. Furthermore, it tries to find whether there is a pattern among the errors committed by students in their translations. To this end, a translation test of Persian journalistic texts was developed. Forty students studying English translation were recruited for this study. In order to analyze collected data, Keshavarz’s Model (1997) and ATA were used for error analysis. The current study found that there is not a pattern among errors committed by students. The most frequent errors were categorized as (i) grammar, (ii) terminology, and (iii) misunderstanding of original text.