A Comparative Study of Translation Quality as Done by Bilinguals and Trilinguals: A Case Study of Persian Bilingual and Kurdish Trilingual Translation Students of English in Iran

Individual case studies by linguists have concluded that early bilingualism is advantageous to children’s cognitive and linguistic development. Also, the existence of more than two languages in the brain suggests that multilinguals enhance cognitive control when compared to bilinguals. Accordingly, this study examined the differential roles of bilingualism and trilingualism (multilingualism) on the quality of translation. Participants were 48 BA students of translation. In order to homogenize them in terms of English language proficiency, Oxford Placement Test was administered. The participants were asked to translate 30 sentences from English into Persian. After collecting the participant’s translations, three raters evaluated the quality of their translations. The results revealed that the performance of the trilinguals on the translation was significantly higher than that for the bilinguals. Moreover, the correlation between trilingualism and the quality of translation was higher than the correlation between bilingualism and the quality of translation.