Abstract - The present study is conducted on two English groups of translation and literature students. The purpose of the research is to compare the literary translation (LT) quality between literature and translation groups. Translation students have passed translation courses including literary translation; correspondingly, literature students have passed literary courses and literary translation. The former is much experienced in translation and familiar with its theories and rules; the latter is familiar with the literature world as literary elements, genre, rules, the proper writers and poets and their styles. For this purpose 45 out of 50 students turned out in the survey to translate a literary text from English into Persian. The translations were graded by a university translation instructor according to Waddington Translation Assessment Model C and were compared between the groups. After performing Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for the normality of the data, t- test was run on it and the result proved no significant difference between translation and literature students in LT quality. It confirmed that literature knowledge is as important as translation knowledge in LT.

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