translation and esp textbooks evaluation: the case of extra-linguistic sub-competence needs in legal and journalistic sources

The present study attempted to evaluate legal and journalistic translation course books, as well as esp textbooks for students of law and students of journalism to investigate whether they meet students’ needs. in so doing, it made attempts to compare extra-linguistic knowledge of three groups of undergraduate students of english translation, law, and journalism. to address the issues, data were collected from eight most popular legal and journalism translation books as well as eight legal and journalism esp books. besides, a researcher-made extra-linguistic questionnaire inspected the participants’ beliefs about specialized translation. the evaluation of different specialized sources in esp program, despite the program objectives, showed that it cannot train legal and journalistic translators. the questionnaire analysis indicated that translation students were more powerful in search sub-competence domain but in background knowledge domain law students did not do differently from translation students. the findings emphasized the role of extra-linguistic sub-competence in the promotion of total translation competence.