The Relationship between Translation Strategies Awareness and Students’ Translation Quality

Abstract

Abstract
This study explored the extent to which the undergraduate BA. Translation program students are aware of translation strategies (TS) and its role in producing high quality target text. It was conducted on a sample of 144 undergraduate Yemeni students of English and translation departments. A questionnaire was distributed to 92 students majoring in the translation programs at the University of Science and Technology (UST) and Sana’a University (SU) to measure their degree of awareness of TS in addition to a translation test comprised of three text types: technical, literary and journalistic to be translated from English into Arabic. The test was conducted on the 92 translation students and 52 non-translation program students at Hodeidah University to measure their translation quality and to compare their performance with regards to their awareness of TS. Pearson’s correlation, Mann-Whitney-U Test, Kruskal-Wallis Test, and Chi-square Test of Independence were used to analyze the data. The results showed that students of translation are aware of translation strategies to somewhat extent, low extent and to great extent respectively. The results also revealed a positive relationship between students’ degree of awareness of TS and their translation quality which is statistically significant p-value=0.01 in a comparison to insignificant relationship between students’ performance and other external factors such as reasons of majoring in translation, courses in language skills, training in translation and Arabic language degree of interest p-value is >.05. Moreover, translation program students have produced high quality target texts more than the non-translation program students. In the light of the results, it is recommended to teach TS explicitly in a separate course in the translation programs and to pay more effective focus to train students during classroom activities to build their strategic competence.