The Effect of Genre Awareness on English Translation Quality and Pedagogy: A Case of News Reports Translation as an Academic Curriculum

Abstract

To produce an adequate translation, language students are required to learn varieties of language features including syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Considering the curriculum language learners are face with, one can claim that almost all language students in Iran are taught these features in their academic settings including linguistic courses. Yet, there are some aspects of language which are disregarded in course books and syllabi and ignored by language teachers. Thus, language learners find it a formidable task to deal with these shrugged off aspects of their curricula. Genre of language is among these invisible features which have challenged translation students in translating specific texts. News reports is one of these genres that Iranian media translators, in spite of enjoying technical competence in language, are not familiar with knowledge and rhetorical conventions of it. So, the current is conducted to investigate the familiarity of these translators with genre features of news discourse and examine the effect of raising genre awareness on developing the quality of translation. To this aim, fourteen translation students studying translation for media purpose were selected through convenient sampling who were given some news reports to translate. Using Baker's taxonomy (1992) and House's quality assessment model (1997), the quality of their translations were assessed before genre awareness raising session and after it. The findings showed that the quality of translation ameliorated meaningfully after the instruction, indicating the importance of genre knowledge in linguistic competence. These findings have implications for syllabus designers and EAP and ESP teachers and students.