Challenges in English-to-Persian Text Translation for Translation Students

Translation is not a mechanical substitution of linguistic items; it is an interpretive process of meaning reconstruction in a new linguistic and cultural environment. In translation studies, it is widely recognized that translators must make decisions that balance fidelity to source meaning with acceptability and effectiveness in the target. English-to-Persian translation is particularly demanding for translation students because English and Persian differ in lexical organization, grammatical encoding, discourse conventions, and stylistic norms. Consequently, students often encounter challenges at multiple levels, including lexical ambiguity (polysemy), idiomaticity, phrasal verbs, collocation constraints, sentence structuring, tense-aspect mapping, passive constructions, pragmatic meaning, culture-specific references and register control. This paper examines these challenges systematically and proposes pedagogically grounded strategies such as pre-translation analysis, contextual reading, restructuring and paraphrasing, glossary development for terminological consistency, and critical use of machine translation. The paper argues that effective English-to-Persian translation requires more than bilingual competence; it requires analytical sensitivity to discourse, audience expectations, and the communicative function of the source text.

Keywords:

translation challenges , lexical equivalence , pragmatic translation , terminology , register