20 International Research Journal of English Language Teaching and Literature Studies Vol. 1, No. 2 (2013): 1-5 Research Article Open Access A Study of Translation Strategies Used in Translation of Specialized Terms of Psychology from English into Persian Mustafa Shabanipoor 1 * and Ahmad Moinzadeh 2 1 MA student of translation studies at the University of Isfahan, Iran 2 Assistant Professor of the Department of English of the University of Isfahan, Iran *Corresponding author: Mustafa Shabanipoor; email: mustafa.shabanipoor@gmail.com ABSTRACT Translation of the specialized terms of different fields of science has always been a great challenge for translators. In today’s world, with the increasing growth of science, new scientific concepts and terms keep being created in languages. In order to help disseminate scientific achievements in the world these terms have to enter different languages. This study is a descriptive research which focuses on the translation of the specialized terms of the field of psychology and seeks to study the different translation strategies employed by English-Persian dictionaries to find Persian equivalents for English specialized terms of psychology. For this purpose, the study uses Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958) model of translation strategies at the level of lexicon. The data collected for the study comprise 200 English specialized terms of psychology randomly selected from The Concise Dictionary of Psychology (1998) along with their 694 Persian equivalents proposed by the three bilingual dictionaries. The findings of the study identify the problems the translators might face in translating specialized terms of psychology from English into Persian. The findings also show which translation procedures are used more frequently by the dictionaries to translate the specialized terms of psychology into Persian. Keywords: translation, terminology, equivalence, translation strategies 1. INTRODUCTION Translating the specialized texts of scientific fields has always been a challenge for translators working in those fields. One of the problems is that they might encounter difficulties in adopting appropriate equivalents in the target language for the specialized terms existing in the source language. Besides, dictionaries and databases might not be comprehensive enough to provide appropriate equivalents for all the specialized terms, especially the newly-coined ones, of a field of study. This fact, at times, obligates translators to go beyond their task of translating and act as terminologists to create new, appropriate equivalents and thus tackle this challenge. Like any other scientific field, the field of psychology, too, is growing rapidly and new concepts keep entering it. Since every concept that enters a language requires a name to refer to it, new terms are required to be produced in the language. If we want to benefit from the achievements of modern science, psychology in our case, we need to bring these concepts into our own language. That is where the task of translation begins. There are a number of English-Persian dictionaries offering Persian equivalents for the specialized terms of psychology. However, studying some of these dictionaries, I encountered two problems. First, in some cases there was no agreement among the dictionaries as to which specific Persian equivalent to be consistently used for a technical term. Therefore, there was often an inconsistency in the choice of equivalents in the psychological texts translated from English into Persian; second, at times, some of the dictionaries had offered erroneous equivalents which did not convey the meaning of the English term. In fact it was apparent that the authors of the dictionary had not had any understanding of what the original term meant or had Received: 10 August 2013 Accepted: 20 August 2013 Online: 01 September 2013 International Research Journal of English Language Teaching and Literature Studies (IJELTS) Journal 1