Assessing the Usage of Farhangestan’s Suggested Words among Undergraduate Students of Translation Studies

The purpose of this study was to assess the use of words which have been suggested by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (Farhangestan) among the undergraduate students of Translation Studies. Although this organization has done lots of work to cleanse the intrusive effect of unwanted foreign words from the body of Persian language, the effectiveness of their work is still unknown. For so doing, one hundred undergraduate senior students majoring in Translation Studies were selected as the sample of the study. All of the participants had passed morphology and Persian syntax courses and hence they were completely aware of the organization and word formation processes. The design of this study was based on a quantitative procedure of data collection through a test. The participants were asked to describe some pictures in the test, and also translate some sentences into Persian to see whether they use Farhangestan’s suggested words or not. Then, we analyzed the content of their writings to examine the extent to which they used the suggested words by Farhangestan. The results showed a very few instances of using these Persian-made words which had been intended to be used instead of their foreign equivalents. The results of the study were discussed and the implications for further research and practitioners were presented.