Assertiveness and Prediction of Marked Structures in the Translations of Undergraduate English Students

Markedness in linguistics is the state of being distinct, peculiar or complicated in comparison to a more usual or common form. Markedness has been widely studied in the literature. However, almost no study has ever explored the relationship between translators’ assertiveness and their preference of marked structures in translation. This article aims to investigate the relationship between the assertiveness level of Iranian undergraduate English students and their preference for using lexical and grammatical marked structures in their Persian translations. To this end, 60 undergraduate English students completed the Assertiveness Scale developed by Alberti & Emmons (1995), and rendered ten short statements taken from the story “Child by Tiger” into Persian. The translation test was scored by two raters, based on the use of marked lexical (e.g. wrong collocations, plurals) and grammatical (e.g. reduced clauses( structures in the students’ translation, and a high inter-rater reliability was achieved. Results revealed a significant positive relationship between the test-takers’ assertiveness and their preference to render English marked structures into Persian marked structures. The findings have implications for translation instructors.