the relation between bilingualism and translation: a case study of turkish bilingual and persian monolingual translation students

translation studies have become an accepted academic subject and books, journals and doctoral dissertations appear faster than one can read them all (bassnet and lefevere, 1990). but this field also brought with itself so many other issues which needed to be investigated more, in the heart of which, issues like ideology, ethics, culture, bilingualism and multilingualism. it is reported that over a billion people in the world speak more than one language fluently. according to rahimpour (2001), it is estimated that half the population of the world is bilingual. this study intends to examine the relation between bilingualism and translation. does always bilingualism have advantages in translation or sometimes it might cause a problem for bilingual translators who do not translate into their mother language? another question in this study is to learn whether translation process of bilingual translators is different from other translators or not. to achieve the study goals in this research which contain both qualitative and quantitative approach, 20 bilingual and 20 monolingual iranian ba and ma students were given a colloquial text to translate. seven bilingual translators from bilingual group were asked to mention their translation process in order to analyze bilinguals’ translation process. think aloud method was used in analyzing of these seven translators’ translation process. the results of statistical analysis indicated that there is no significant difference between translations of bilinguals and monolinguals. the findings of translation process of bilinguals indicated that all the bilingual translators at least once resort to their mother language turkish in their translation into target language which was persian.