Needed Skills and Strategies to Improve the Efficiency of Sight Translation in Classroom Context

Abstract

There has been relatively little research on sight translation. The present research is an attempt to inspect the fundamental findings of a pilot study including ten student and four professional interpreters’ sight translations from English (L2) into Persian (L1). This research paper investi- gates the transcriptions of their sight translation performance on the basis of their reading speed and Lee’s (2008) tripartite model: accuracy, delivery quality and the quality of target language expressions. With this idea, the results illustrated that student interpreters’ group need to advance their sight translation skills as well as their reading performance to fully perceive the source text and differentiate the main ideas from the secondary ones. The analysis of data indicates that student interpreting performances mostly depend on literal and word-for-word translation in which they have difficulties to free themselves from the context and form of the source language. In other words, they seem to have problems with “deverbalization” (Seleskovitch 1975; Donovan- Cagigos 1990). By the same token, these findings have pedagogical implications for the teaching of sight translation in classroom context. Finally, this research paper discusses the strategies such as delaying response and lexical and syntactic compressions increasing and shortening the time of delivery and the quality of target language expression.