reflections on taught courses of the iranian ma program in english translation: a mixed-methods study

the issue of curriculum and syllabus evaluation and revision has been in center of attention right from when curriculum came into attention of educational institutions. thus everywhere in the world in educational institutions curricula and syllabi are evaluated and revised based on the goals, the needs, existing content, etc.. in iran any curriculum is designed in a committee of specialists and decisions are made on the courses, the content, and the teaching material and most importantly on the goals set to be achieved by that curriculum. but this does not mean that the curriculum is not in need of constant revision since the goals and the people for whom the curriculum has been designed are in constant changes and the content and teaching material need updating to be compatible with the goals. the issue of designing a curriculum for ma in english translation has come to attention right from the beginning of the courses in iran because the original curriculum was merely a series of courses selected from well-known universities of the world offering courses in this subject. therefore, it was obvious from the beginning that the curriculum hardly matches the local needs and necessities in iran. the purpose of the present study is to find out the necessities for a proper curriculum for ma in english translation from three different sources; the strategic plans of the country namely, the comprehensive national map of science and the fifth national development plan, the opinion and assessment of the lecturers of the subject, and the opinion and assessment of the students and graduates. the whole process of research has been divided into three phases. the first one, qualitative in nature, is to investigate the two mentioned major strategic plans the comprehensive national map of science and the fifth national development plan. the purpose of this phase is to find out what are the general strategies recommended and what applications are conceived in the issue of designing curriculum and syllabus for ma in english translation. the results revealed that the two plans recommended strategies applicable to develop curriculum for all the subjects including english translation. the next phase of the research again qualitative was conducted by means of semi-structured interviews from eight professors and lecturers teaching ma courses of english translation. the purpose of this phase was to investigate the assessment and opinion of lecturers dealing with the curriculum of ma of english translation. the answers were gathered around the issues such as strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum, necessary modifications, necessary and unnecessary courses, needs analysis, teaching methods, and teaching material. the results were analyzed in relation to the results of previous phase. the last phase qualitative in nature was supposed to investigate the assessment and opinion of the students and graduates. a questionnaire containing the courses of the curriculum was designed based on likert scale to gather data from students. the data (the idea of the respondents about each of the courses as whether necessary or unnecessary) were analyzed and the most necessary and unnecessary courses in the respondents’ points of view were identified. finally, exploratory factor analysis was applied to the data to summarize the 52 items of the questionnaire into a limited number of factors for a better understanding of the views of the respondents over the necessary and unnecessary course. key words: ma in english translation, translation curriculum, needs assessment, the fifth national development plan, the comprehensive national map of science, iran