چكيده لاتين :
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
studentsי 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.
