Iranian University Student's Errors in Translating the Persian Prepositions into English

‌ In this paper, the researcher aimed at, first, presenting a nice, brief, and comprehensive classification of the Persian prepositions and their English equivalents, and second, at determining Iranian university students’ degree of mastery in finding proper equivalents when they try to translate the Persian prepositions into English. To achieve this goal, a researcher-made handout consisting of 8 Persian sentences was given to 45 MS and MA level students at Tarbiat Modarres University in which they were asked to translate the Persian sentences to English. The results of this study demonstrated that most of Iranian students face many problems in this challenge and show many weak points. In fact, they committed errors as: ungrammatical deletion of English prepositions, unnecessary addition of English prepositions, and the wrong interchanging of English prepositions. Finally, the raw data obtained ‌from the handouts were analyzed using SPSS11 via the statistics of frequency, percent, and odd ratio.