In a world with a complex and multifaceted socio-political agenda, translators as intercultural mediators need to be equipped with a critical eye for implicit ideologies in linguistic and symbolic discourses which are the main instrumentation in shaping and reshaping mental and cognitive frameworks of the public through which they conceive of the world and act accordingly. In the context of Iranian translator education, the study investigates the effeteness of educational levels in addition to gender on the attentiveness and priorities of prospective English translators as for exploring various levels which are apt to accommodate power relations and ideological representations in socio-political discourse in translation. The study uses an empirically validated questionnaire instrument (Khoshsaligheh, 2012) which draws on ideological square and ideological discourse structures advocated by van Dijk (1998, 2000, 2009). Using inferential statistics, the analysis of the data indicates that the educational exposure currently is not an effective variable for improving the attentiveness of prospective English translators, and neither is the variable of gender.

Keywords