On the Translation Evaluation Methods As Practiced in Iranian Universities BA Translation Program: The Attitude of Students

Translator education is now widely practiced in Iran. Every year a huge number of candidates are accepted into the English Translation Program at B.A. level. Teaching translation inevitably involves evaluating the quality of the translations produced by students and giving a grade for the achievement of the intended goal. Thus, there are always final exams of translation to be developed, administered, evaluated and scored. Based on such scores, decisions are made by translation teachers and university officials; decisions that seriously affect students educational career in particular and their whole life in general. Accordingly, this study aimed at investigating the attitude of undergraduate Iranian students majoring in English translation towards the way their instructors test their translation ability. In so doing, the researchers developed and administered a 33-item Likert-type questionnaire to 120 senior students studying at four various Iranian universities including state universities, the non-for-profit ones, the Islamic Azad Universities, and Payam-e-Noor University. The findings showed an overall negative impression of the final tests on students. Whereas the subjects were highly pleased with the access to dictionaries (but not to glossaries) and to some extent with the content validity and the test instructions, they were not satisfied with the scoring procedures at all. Their main source of deep dissatisfaction included time allocation, the difficulty level, text selection and the reliability. Interestingly enough, the test format commonly used was considered appropriate only by half of the respondents. As part of the solution, the authors suggest a shift toward more direct, performance-based tests using standard scoring rubrics. Moreover, translation instructors-evaluators must get acquainted with modem theories of translation evaluation as well as the existing evaluation schemes and observe more strictly the principles of test development. In particular, they should use test specifications and scoring rubrics to establish and promote the test validity and reliability respectively.