Students’ Perceptions of Translation: Art, Craft and/or Science?

Abstract

The theories and application of translation have been investigated primarily from the perspective of researchers, accredited translators, translation teachers, and trainers. This study examines the lenses through which translation students are motivated to embark on the journey of translation. Whereas translation has long been considered to be an art in which translators principally rely on their talent and passion, or a profession in which practitioners are expected to have acquired necessary skills, translation has gained status as an academic discipline on its own in the past few decades. This paper aims to examine how students from different ethnic backgrounds perceive translation to be while studying the subject at university. To do so, a research questionnaire is devised to obtain students’ perceptions of translation as to whether they perceive it to be an art, craft, or science. The questionnaire aims at translation students from diverse ethnic backgrounds, specifically: Arabic, Kurdish, and Persian. The results reveal that the student participants perceive translation to be a combination of the three elements of art, craft and science but to slightly varying degrees.