An Examination of the Errors Committed by Iranian MA Students in their Translation of Advertisement Slogans Based on Keshavarz’s Taxonomy of Errors

Abstract

The present work is an attempt to reveal the nature of translating advertisement slogans over two different cultures by investigating the errors that will occur by Iranian MA translation students in translating a corpus of advertisements from English into Persian and vice versa. The sample of this study consisted of sixty MA students of translation studies who were randomly selected from three Azad university branches (Fars Science and Research branch, Tehran Science and Research and Bandar Abbas Azad University). The instruments used for data collection included a questionnaire consisted of eight advertising slogans in English and seven in Persian for products that were internationally marketed. The statistical procedure to analyze the data was Chi-square procedure to illustrate the frequency and percentage of errors occurrence. The results demonstrated that the ratio of wrong answers in the two languages is not the same. Generally, participants committed more errors in the translation of the Persian advertisement slogans comparing to English ones. Most errors participants committed in Persian translation slogans were related to grammatical and lexical interferences and most errors participants committed in English translation slogans were related to misunderstanding and misinterpretation of semantic and pragmatic aspects of the slogans.