Exploring predictors of translation performance

Abstract

The study reported on examined the question of whether translators’ cognitive faculties might be able to predict their performance on a translation task. Research on individual cognitive differences in translation has been a new issue in the realm of Translation Studies. However, the majority of previous studies have targeted single cognitive faculties for the purpose of investigation and we therefore know little about how sets of cognitive faculties can affect the process of translation from one language into another. In this study, three individual cognitive differences were targeted: emotional intelligence (EI), tolerance of ambiguity (TA), and working memory (WM). For the purposes of the study, 54 Iranian MA students of Translation Studies were sampled as participants. The participants completed measures of their EI, TA, and WM. In addition, they were requested to translate an excerpt from English (Source Language) into Persian (Target Language). The results of multiple regression analysis indicated that the regression model, incorporating EI, TA, and WM as its predictors, was able to predict a significant amount of variance in participants’ translation performance. Of the three predictors, the contributions of TA and WM to the total variance in the participants’ translation scores were statistically significant, while the contribution of EI to the total variance was not. The findings of the study have some implications for research and practice in the field of Translation Studies.

Exploring the role of translators’ emotion regulation and critical thinking ability in translation performance

“…Their study implicated the significant role of emotional intelligence to gain a deeper understanding of translation and interpreting processes. Having used Waddington (2001) translation assessment rubric, Ghobadi et al (2021) investigated the predictability power of individual cognitive-emotional differences, including working memory, emotional intelligence, and, tolerance of ambiguity, in translation performance. They found that the interaction of these cognitive-emotional components predicts translation performance.…”

The impact of task complexity and translating self-efficacy belief on students’ translation performance: Evidence from process and product data

“…While exploring the relationship between personality type and performance in translating expressive, appellative and informative texts, Shaki and Khoshsaligheh (2017) concluded that the sensing-type students delivered less successful performance than the intuitive-type students in all three tasks. Their performance was evaluated against Waddington’s (2001) rubric, which was also adopted by Ghobadi et al (2021) to assess participants’ translation performance. Meanwhile, some studies considered translation performance as the sum of behaviors that participants controlled in the process of translation ( Muñoz Martín, 2014 ).…”

“…As translation problems are individual and arise from the interplay between task properties and characteristics of task performers ( Muñoz Martín and Olalla-Soler, 2022 ), translators may deliver varied performance even on the same task. Studies that investigated the interplay between task properties and translator characteristics worked on such individual differences as L2 proficiency ( Pokorn et al, 2019 ), working memory capacity ( Wang, 2022 ), and emotional intelligence ( Ghobadi et al, 2021 ), among others. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has so far investigated how task complexity influences the translation performance of students with different levels of self-efficacy belief, an important affective variable influencing students’ motivation and learning ( Bandura, 1997 ) and a construct recently introduced into translation studies ( Yang et al, 2021a ).…”

Investigating the relationship between online information seeking and translation performance among translation students: The mediating role of translation self-efficacy

“…Previous research has proved that self-efficacy before performing search activities can affect the motivation for accomplishing the tasks and thus affect the final task performance (Ross et al, 2016). Secondly, translation is considered as a complex and high-cognitive activity affected by different types of factors such as translation self-efficacy (Rojo and Caro, 2018;Ghobadi et al, 2021). Therefore, translation selfefficacy during online information seeking can influence the allocation of cognitive resources and the amount of effort and perseverance to be applied to perform tasks, especially in the face of difficulties (Bolaños-Medina, 2014;Bolaños-Medina and Núñez, 2018).…”