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This paper gives an overview of the methods employed in process-oriented investigations of translation competence and its development and describes their advantages and drawbacks. Furthermore, it provides a survey of the findings gained in this field of research so far. It then focuses on desiderata. Special emphasis will be placed on the contrastive evaluation of methods, on longitudinal studies, as well as on the documentation and dissemination of process data. The design of one longitudinal study, TransComp, which investigates the development of translation competence in 12 students of translation over a period of three years and compares it to that of 10 professional translators with more than 10 years of experience, will be introduced. Furthermore, asset management systems will be suggested to make translation process data accessible to the scientific community and lay the foundations for a platform for information exchange between scholars working in the field of translation process research. At the end of the article, the contributions collected in this volume will be introduced.

In this article some of the results of two think-aloud protocol studies (Gerloff 1988 and Jââskelâinen 1990) are compared. The purpose of the comparison is to illustrate two findings: (I) that translation does not always get easier as professional experience increases, and (2) that professional translators do not always succeed better than non-professionals. The emphasis is on these somewhat disturbing observations because they are particularly suitable for illustrating tentative hypotheses about the role of affective factors in translation. These, in turn, have important implications for teaching translation.