The Challenges Characterising Arabic-Persian Translation Pedagogy at Iranian Universities from Professor’s Standpoint

Abstract

The present research endeavors to deploy a survey methodology towards studying the challenges of teaching Arabic-Persian translation at the Islamic Republic of Iran’s universities. To achieve this objective, a questionnaire was prepared using the SPSS software in three levels of general, professional, and translation principles. The statistical population comprised 18 translation professors randomly selected from prestigious public universities. One of the most critical findings is the importance of all the titles included in the questionnaire from the teachers' point of view. Additionally, the principles of translation, having scored an average of 32.4 is more important to the experts of this field compared to other specialized subjects concerning translation, which scored an average of 26.4. On the other hand, the findings suggest that a low percentage of the statistical population was engaged in the field of translation and used traditional and teacher-focused teaching methods, therefore being unaware of new methods in teaching translation. Suggested solutions could include determination of specific and codified topics, enhancement of bilingual capabilities of students through introducing them to different types of parallel texts, encouraging them to increase studying different types of texts, using workshop-oriented and group translation, enhancing the capability of the student to defend his/her translation, modifying and correcting the translation, and introducing students to new methods and tools to facilitate translation through corpora and social media networks.

Keywords

• teaching arabic translation
• translation
• theoretical foundation for translation
• translation specialization