MAKING TRANSLATOR’S INTERCULTURAL TRAINING REALITY: MEASURING TRANSLATOR’S INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

Nowadays, the intercultural competence is deemed necessary for any person, regardless of one’s age or occupation. With respect to higher education, Diversity and Interculturality competence has been classified as interpersonal generic and thus beneficiary for all higher education graduates, regardless of their specialization. This alone might have been a reason enough to strive to incorporate the intercultural competence development within Translation and Interpreting university degrees. Yet, the cultural component has long been unanimously recognized as an essential part of translator competence and training, as well. In spite of this, there are no published scientifically grounded methodological proposals or reviews of courses aimed at developing student translators’ intercultural competence.

The present paper is based on a research project whose goal is to make a formalised contribution towards filling the gap between the perceived need and the consequent demand for intercultural training component, on the one hand, and the methodological proposals that make the intercultural training of student translators possible, on the other. In order to address the issue of designing an intercultural training course, an instrument measuring the translator’s intercultural competence that could be used as pre-test and post-test to determine the efficiency or lack of such of any training is required. The paper reports on the progress of the research initiative aimed at developing and primarily validating two such instruments – a self-evaluation questionnaire and a criterion-referenced achievement test. These two tests measure the level of student translators’ intercultural competence and the correlation between the student’s self-perception and the actual performance he/she is capable of demonstrating. The stages discussed are those from construct description to creating trilingual version of the instrument as a result of a collaborative effort of a multilingual and multicultural team. These include the key intermediate tasks of items specification and construction, of pilot testing, of interviewing ‘student-judges’ and of obtaining experts' judgements. The paper also outlines the plan of future actions aimed at collecting further validity and reliability evidence.