Ongoingly redesigning metacognitive questionnaires helping trainees to self-evaluate their translating

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the redesign of metacognitive questionnaires carried out along a two-part German-Spanish translation course. The study focuses on post-translation questionnaires used by trainees to self-evaluate their translating, as a function of their strategic subcompetence. Post-translation questionnaires were redesigned ongoingly, as needed, in order to improve their effectiveness in meeting the trainees’ evolving needs. This redesign was based on the students’ feedback combined with the teacher’s perceptions, and led to three types of changes. Firstly, questions not optimally meeting the intended target were modified. As the mental action involved in these questions was not specific enough to prevent off-target answers, each was reworded accordingly and occasionally given an interpersonal dimension favouring intermental reflection. Secondly, certain questions were newly designed, so that they included such interpersonal dimension from the very beginning. These also presented the students with open tasks promoting learner autonomy and asked them to justify their answers, thereby enhancing their translational reflection. Thirdly, a group of questions were suppressed from one part of the course to the other, as the mental action involved in each no longer matched the trainees’ increased procedural knowledge.

The impact of a metacognitive self-regulation inventory in translator self-training: a pre-post study with English-Chinese translation students

“…Fernández and his colleagues (Fernández & Zabalbeascoa 2012a;Fernández & Arumí Ribas 2014) have designed several open-ended metacognitive questionnaires for translation studies, including, for example, questions on the intention of the sender, the expectation of the receiver, background information of the source text (ST), the coherence of the translation, or stylistic questions involved in the translation. Using these questionnaires as a starting point, together with metacognitive self-regulation dimensions, we designed a new closed-ended MSRI focusing particularly on regulative strategies in English-Chinese translation.…”

“…In the existing literature, the relationship between metacognition and translation competence (Alves & Gonçalves 2004;Angelone 2010;Angelone & Shreve 2011), as well as the importance of metacognition in translation pedagogy (Fernández 2008;Fernández & Zabalbeascoa 2012a, 2012bFernández & Arumí Ribas 2014;Mellinger 2019;Pietrzak 2018) have been investigated in some depth, with metacognitive questionnaires being suggested as a useful instrument to stimulate metacognition for trainee translators. Most of the metacognitive questionnaires used in previous research have consisted of open-ended questions, with the aim of stimulating and training metacognitive activity by pushing students to examine their own metacognitive processes, and then to improve their strategic competence.…”