iranian english language translation students’ linguistic translation errors in translating literary texts

Translation is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language to the other language (gao, 2010). in yarmohammadi’s (2010) point of view, an ideal translation is the one that no one recognizes as a translation. in other words, the translated text should read as it was written in the target language originally. unfortunately, many translated texts in iran have lost their meaning and in some cases the sense of the main message in the source language has been omitted. given this background this study aims to shed light on the problems which students face in translating from persian to english. na pham’s (2005) error analysis, which considers linguistic translation errors, was conducted to find out students’ main problems in translating from persian to english. 30 english language translation students were selected through purposive sampling. persian - english translation text were conducted for data collection. all the students' translations were analyzed in order to investigate linguistic problems in translating literary texts. moreover, 3 lecturers were interviewed to find out students’ causes of errors in translation. it was found that the participants had syntactic errors in their translations. it is hoped that this study will provide a new perspective for the objective assessment of some translation devices and instructions for the teachers in universities by considering the linguistic aspects.