Disciplinary Meaning-Making in ESP Translation: An SFL-Informed Discourse Analysis of Social Sciences Student-Teachers

Hemmati, Ali

Volume 11, Issue 3 (7-2026) IJREE 2026, 11(3): 115-138 | Back to browse issues page

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Hemmati A. (2026). Disciplinary Meaning-Making in ESP Translation: An SFL-Informed Discourse Analysis of Social Sciences Student-Teachers. , IJREE. 11(3),
URL: http://ijreeonline.com/article-1-1093-en.html

Disciplinary Meaning-Making in ESP Translation: An SFL-Informed Discourse Analysis of Social Sciences Student-Teachers

Ali Hemmati ^*

Department of English Language Teaching, Farhangian University, P.O. Box 14665-889, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract: (375 Views)

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) translation is increasingly viewed as a discourse-mediated process in which learners reconstruct disciplinary meaning rather than merely transfer linguistic forms across languages. Guided by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this explanatory sequential mixed-methods study investigated how Iranian social sciences student-teachers reconstructed disciplinary meaning as they translated specialized academic texts. Forty-two participants completed a discipline-specific English–Persian translation task and a questionnaire, and fifteen subsequently participated in semi-structured interviews. Quantitative analyses identified lexical-semantic interpretation, nominalization, and discourse organization as the principal challenges affecting translation performance. Qualitative findings showed that these difficulties arose primarily from interpreting and reorganizing disciplinary discourse rather than from vocabulary limitations alone. Learners who adopted flexible meaning-oriented reformulation strategies produced more coherent translations, whereas reliance on literal translation was associated with weaker reconstruction of ideational and textual meanings and lower translation confidence. Overall, the findings suggest that successful ESP translation depends on learners' ability to negotiate disciplinary meaning through discourse-sensitive interpretation and reformulation across languages. The study contributes to SFL-informed ESP translation research by demonstrating the importance of discourse-level meaning reconstruction and highlights the value of translation pedagogy that explicitly develops learners' awareness of rhetorical organization, grammatical metaphor, and disciplinary discourse.

Keywords: English for specific purposes (ESP), systemic functional linguistics, disciplinary meaning-making, discourse analysis, translation

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Type of Study: Research | Subject: Special

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