Reading Comprehension Assessment In The Translation Process

The critical role which translation plays in the contemporary world has generated interest in studies of the underlying skills and knowledge required for translating and how they are taught. Although significant research has been conducted in identifying these skills, less attention has been devoted to evolving empirically founded bases for measuring and teaching these competencies. Adopting Kintsch Model of Text Comprehension and Sowa s Conceptual Graph formalism, the methodology for the research reported in this book involves two groups of students (with and without exposure to explicit text visualisation techniques), performing, first, reading comprehension tasks, and then translation tasks. The results of the comparison indicate that the quality of performance on the translation task could be mirrored through the reading comprehension task. Secondly, the group that was exposed to visualisation techniques performed better than the group that was not so exposed. The findings in this book will provide translator trainers and students with the basis on how a text visualisation approach can serve in teaching, assessing and enhancing reading comprehension competence in translation.