Original versus Translated EAP Texts: the Problem of Main Idea Equivalence and Global Understanding

Abstract

Most academic and scientific writing is nowadays done in English and students are therefore required to read books and do assignments using this medium. The present research was aimed at a comparative study of reading comprehension of EAP original texts and their translations. As many as 50 MA students, majoring in different branches of management, were randomly selected. Out of these 50 students, 30 were asked to take an English reading comprehension test, consisting of 15 multiple-choice questions – 4 questions addressed main ideas of passages to measure global understanding and 11 measured local understanding. The rest of the students took the same reading test for the Persian translations of the same passages; they also took a Nelson test so that their homogeneity in terms of language proficiency would be ensured. The results indicated that the students tended to understand main ideas of the English texts better than those of their translations; however, as regards details, this was not true; i.e., they did not understand details of English texts better than those of Persian translations. The findings suggest that the process of transfer from SL to TL mainly affects the finding of complete equivalences for main ideas, rather than details, due to the fact that the former are higher-order propositions and usually operate at textual level.