Discourse and ideology are closely intertwined constructs with significant implications for both professional and trainee translators working across diverse contexts and language pairs. This quantitative study investigates which aspects of source text discourse Iranian translator trainees examine to identify embedded ideologies during their translation process. To this end, the categories of discourse structures proposed by van Dijk (2009) were used to develop a questionnaire that was later distributed among 469 Iranian translator trainees. The construct and external validity of the data collected using this original instrument were established through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results indicated that among the nine identified categories of ideological discourse structures—as various dimensions or levels of discourse—trainees prioritized more tangible discourse levels, such as text organization, as more likely to contain ideological representations, whereas more abstract levels, such as argumentation, were considered less important.

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