Schema of Translators and Its Influence on Translation Quality: A Case Study of the Iranian Undergraduate Literary Translation Students

This article is a research on the effects of background knowledge (Content and Linguistic schemata) on the translation quality of Iranian undergraduate literary translation students. In order to conduct the research, the Treatment and Control group design was used. The participants of this study were randomly divided into three groups. All the participants were assigned to do an English to Persian translation production test after the treatments. In an attempt to arouse schemata, the experimental group 1 and experimental group 2 were given pre-translation, schemata-activating materials, while the Control-group engaged in translation test without any preliminary schemata-inducing activities. The treatment for the first experimental group consisted of being exposed to content background knowledge (schemata) about the topic of the translation. The treatment for the second experimental group consisted of being exposed to Linguistic background knowledge about the topic of translation. In the meantime, the control group was not given any treatments. The schemata-inducing activities were of two types: for content schemata, we used reading Persian domain specific texts referring to the content area of the text to be translated. For linguistic schemata, we used memorizing English technical terminology and their Persian equivalents. Outputs of the three groups were evaluated by three raters according to Waddington s TQA model (2001) to assess the impact of background knowledge. The statistical analysis revealed that both content schemata and linguistic schemata improve the quality of translations. Moreover, it was revealed that linguistic schemata better improves translation quality than content schemata.

Keywords:

Background knowledge , Content schemata , Linguistic schemata , Translation Quality , TQA (Translation Quality Assessment)