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The impact of teaching specialized terminology on translation performance: A corpus-based inquiry on law texts translation from English into Persian

Mehrdad Vasheghani Farahani (Universitat Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany)
Zeinab Amiri (Department of English Translation Studies, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran)

Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education

ISSN: 2050-7003

Article publication date: 1 May 2019

Issue publication date: 18 June 2019

162

Abstract

Purpose

In an effort to bridge the gap between applying translation corpora, specialized terminology teaching and translation performance of undergraduate students, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible impacts of teaching specialized terminology of law as a specific area of inquiry on translation performance of Iranian undergraduate translation student (English–Persian language pairs). The null hypothesis of this study is that using specialized terminology does not have statistically significant impacts on the translation performance of the translation students.

Design/methodology/approach

The design of this research was experimental in that there was pretest, treatment, posttest and random sampling. In other words, this research was pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design. This design was used in this research as the number of subjects who participated in the research was limited. Apart from being experimental, this research enjoyed a corpus-based perspective. As Mcenery and Hardie (2012) claim, corpus-based research uses the “corpus data in order to explore a theory or hypothesis, typically one established in the current literature, in order to validate it, refute it or refine it” (p. 6). Table I shows the design of this research.

Findings

The results of this research indicated that on the whole, the posttest results had statistically significant differences with that of the pretest. In this regard, the quality of students’ translation enhanced after using the specialized terminology in the form of three types of corpora. Indeed, there was a general trend in the improved quality of the novice translators in translating specialized and subject-field terminologies in an English–Persian context.

Originality/value

This paper is original in that it probes into one of the less researched areas of Translation Studies Research and employs corpora methodology.

Keywords

Citation

Vasheghani Farahani, M. and Amiri, Z. (2019), "The impact of teaching specialized terminology on translation performance: A corpus-based inquiry on law texts translation from English into Persian", Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 506-521. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-10-2018-0223

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited

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