Listening Practice Influence on the Use of Communication Strategies in Oral Translation

Abstract

Effective communication plays an important role in translation. In oral translation, translation major students must understand the meaning well enough to translate orally or employ some strategies to compensate for the lack of their linguistic knowledge. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to find out the types of communication strategies undergraduate students employ during oral translation and examine the relationship between authentic listening materials’ practice and employment of these strategies. To this end, 34 senior translation major students were videotaped and represented some CNN news samples in the laboratory and their oral translation performance was recorded, for three weeks, and extracted based on Tarone’s taxonomy (1977).The students listened to the audio materials of TOFEL IBT for 5 to 10 minutes a day 4 or 5 times a week at home for two months. Then the same news was represented in the laboratory for three weeks after listening to find whether the frequency of communication strategies has changed and listening materials have affected the frequencies. Despite the unawareness of communication strategies, the students locate them in oral translation. Finally, the statistical results revealed a significant relationship between authentic listening materials’ practice and the use of communication strategies.