Translation

During the last three decades, especially 1980's, language learning specialists have been busy discovering the nature of language learning strategies, describing them, and formulating their relationships with other language learning factors. In line with these studies, the field of translation studies has undergone a complete revolution in terms of its perspective toward its research priorities; that is, recent works tend to adopt a more descriptive rather than prescriptive approach. One of the newly emerged trends in translation studies is the quest for the nature of mental processes applied while translating a text. Following this trend, the present study incorporates think-aloud protocols (TAPs) and retrospective interviews to probe the learning strategies employed by some university students during the translation of an expository text from English to Persian according to the taxonomy of learning strategies presented by Oxford (1990). The results show that (1) the participants tend to incorporate cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies as their dominant strategies, (2) there is no significant difference between direct and indirect strategies incorporated by the participants, and (3) the scope of the taxonomy proposed in the field of language teaching can be generalized to translation studies.

The present research aimed to investigate the effect of background Mozart Classical music on translator students' performance. In this study, the researchers focused not only on the relationship between music and translation but also on the relationship between music and personality traits. The main question this study tried to answer was whether using background music might enhance students' translation scores. To answer this question, 32 students from Islamic Azad University of Quchan, Iran, participated in this study. They were selected out of 40 students, employing Nelson proficiency test and were randomly assigned to two groups. The participants in experimental group were asked to translate three texts accompanied by background music, but the subjects in the control group were asked to translate the same texts without background music during three sessions. Students’ translations were scored based on Kim's (2009) meaning-oriented translation assessment model. Statistical analyses were applied for qualitative data and an interview was designed for the qualitative research question. Researchers concluded that there was a significant difference between the translation scores of the experimental and control groups. The former outperformed the latter group on the translation task.