Translation Procedures Used in Persian Translation of English Technical Terms of Psychology

Abstract

This study is a descriptive enquiry attempting to identify the difficulties facing translators and lexicographers in finding appropriate Persian equivalents for English technical terms of psychology and the procedures used in English-Persian dictionaries to tackle the problems. The framework used in the study is Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958) model of translation strategies at the level of lexicon. The data collected comprised 200 English specialized terms of psychology randomly selected from The Concise Dictionary of Psychology (1998) along with their 694 Persian equivalents proposed by the three bilingual dictionaries. The study identified the problems the translators and lexicographers might face in translating specialized terms of psychology from English into Persian. The findings also show which translation procedures are used more frequently to translate the specialized terms of psychology into Persian. The findings might provide translators with some information as to what difficulties they might face in translating specialized terminology and what strategies they could adopt to tackle those difficulties.