Iranian Novice Interpreters’ Strategies in Translating Political Speech

Abstract

The aim of this qualitative study was to investigate interpreting strategies used by Iranian novice ‎interpreters when translating political speech from English into Persian. The study also sought their ‎opinion about the method of teaching interpreting and its effectiveness in the undergraduate ‎education they experienced. To do so, the six participants were asked to consecutively interpret two ‎short segments of Obama’s speeches. The selection of the participants was based on the criteria of ‎having successfully completed a BA and MA in English Translation and having passed all the courses ‎including those on interpreting and translation of political texts with high scores. For data collection, ‎the study used in-depth interview, retrospective interview, and observation techniques. The results ‎revealed that participants used syntactic modification strategy more than others by far, and the ‎strategies such as paraphrasing, calque, approximation, and borrowing more frequently than ‎segmentation, chunking, queuing and ellipsis. In this study participants’ reactions in facing challenging ‎situations were investigated and a specific behavior as a result was reported. Moreover, they were ‎not able to use note-taking skills effectively. The findings of this study can be of interest to teachers ‎and curriculum developers of interpreting courses.‎