Political Terms in Persian

After twenty years of teaching English to students of political science and other related disciplines at Iranian universities, there found a widespread problems in reading and understanding the English specialized texts among university students of political science and international relations disciplines. One of the problems is the major focus on the ideas and theories of English thinkers either from Anglo-Saxon countries or from academic writing in English and thus the thinkers and writings form other languages is neglected. Another problem is rather internal and due to not having enough equivalents to terms such as “hegemony”, “Committee” and “Commission” in Persian that makes their reading as well as their understanding of similarities and differences much difficult. A problem which is more frequent than the finding the proper equivalent is the exact number of political terms as one counts 338 terms, other 294 ones and the Iranian government Academy of Science and Persian Language counts them 368 terms after more than 2 decades of its work. However, there are encyclopedias of more than 1500 and 1700 terms specific to the political terms writhen by the academics and university faculties. This essay is an introduction to a work gathering more than 120 encyclopedias and translated books in Persian and tries to suggest another way to choose a better equivalent.

Politics, Specialized texts, Equivalents, English, Persian