Action, information-seeking, decision-making profiles, and behaviour of trainee translators: a grounded theory based-model

Abstract

This article presents the results of a quasi-experimental study in which trainee translators’ behaviour was observed during the process of direct translation, English to Spanish, of two different texts. The observation focused on four aspects of the process: the problems, the resources used to solve them, the decisions, and the decision-making criteria. Fifteen subjects that were at four different levels of their undergraduate education at the time of performing the experimental tasks participated in this study. The indicators and categories that emerged from the data coding were combined to describe the action profile, the information-seeking profile, and the problem-solving profile through intrasubject comparison. These differences might be considered as indicators of the level of instrumental and strategic sub-competences acquisition.