Ideology is recognized to be strongly associated with discourse. That is, discourse is believed to be richly inscribed with indications to the ideological tendencies and social orientations of the author. These indications can and do influence the mental frameworks and cognitive models of the discourse audience, through which they observe and interpret the world. The subliminal messages and the delicate yet powerful impact of hidden beliefs in discourse call for awareness of the readership and their critical exploration of what they are exposed to. As House (2009) writes, in geographical areas in which conflict and war are widespread, translators are likely to be engaged in circulating ideologically loaded texts which are designed to further the aims of one group or the other. Translators, therefore, as people with their own ideologies and social orientations, in addition to being the first and at times the only readers of source texts of such kind need to be familiar with where to expect ideological representations in texts, they translate, in order not to fall victims to such influences and to be able to deal with those texts as they see fit. Translators in Iran, a pivotal point in the Middle East as a politically volatile area, need to be fully sensitive to such ideological indications in source texts. Nevertheless, the training system in Iranian universities does not seem to explicitly address this necessity during educating English and Persian translators. The present research investigated where in a socio-political text the students of English translation in Iranian universities tend to explore critically for representations of embedded ideologies during English to Persian translation. To this end, a quantitative study using a self-designed questionnaire of 47 items and a cluster sample of over 400 participants was run. The results demonstrated that the Iranian students of English translation tend to explore structures and devices in the source discourse for embedded ideologies which are at the more tangible and concrete discourse levels, whereas the structure and devices at the more abstract levels were inclined to be referred to, considerably less often. An implication of the results of this field research is further consideration of developing a critical competence in prospective English translators in Iranian universities for analysis of socio-political discourses up to translation.

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