Investigating Novice Translators' Instrumental Competence in Translating from and into a Foreign Language

Instrumental competence is universally considered a compulsory competence for translators. Given its significance, this study investigated the instrumental competence of novice translators in translating from and into a foreign language. To this end, an experiment was conducted with a group of 31 Thai EFL learners who had taken English-Thai Translation and Thai-English Translation courses. Data was collected using recordings of the participants' on-screen translation activities, their translated texts in English and Thai, a pre-translation questionnaire, a post-translation questionnaire, interviews, and direct observations. Not only did the results of the research confirm the growing popularity of electronic translation resources, particularly Machine Translation (MT), but they also revealed that the number of resources used, the total time taken for searches, the number of searches carried out, and the variety of searches carried out did not contribute to the acceptability of the solutions to translation problems. Regarding directionality, various aspects of translating into a foreign language demanded a higher use of translation resources. These results indicated that instrumental competence consists of the translator's knowledge of translation resources and their ability to use them. Consequently, this study proposes that translation teachers and institutions develop novice translators' instrumental skills to prepare them for the translation market where the expert use of modern-day resources and the ability to translate texts accurately, regardless of directionality, are required.