construction and validation of translation metacognitive strategy questionnaire and its application to translation quality

like any other learning activity, translation is a problem solving activity which involves executing parallel cognitive processes. the ability to think about these higher processes, plan, organize, monitor and evaluate the most influential executive cognitive processes is what flavell (1975) called “metacognition” which encompasses raising awareness of mental processes as well as using effective strategies during the task. it goes without saying that improving these two aspects of metacognition can affect the quality of any learning activity like translation. however, translation and metacognition are both fuzzy concepts and it is only through research that some light can be reflected upon these fuzzy areas. this research is an attempt to study translation metacognitive strategies since this special domain of translation has not been extensively discussed in the literature. the purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is any significant relationship between metacognitive strategies and success of non-literary translation, and what type of metacognitive strategies is the best predictor in success of non-literary translation. the researcher approached this matter in a quantitative and qualitative phase. first, after designing the translation metacognitive strategies questionnaire, the researcher administered the questionnaire to 101 participants in order to validate the questionnaire using exploratory factor analysis and then investigate the role of metacognitive strategies in the quality of translation. the participants were also given one english text, to translate from english to persian. their translations were later evaluated by three raters, who were m.a. graduates of translation studies. then the responses of participants in questionnaire on their application of the four subcategories of metacognitive strategy were considered as the independent variables against their non-literary translation scores serving as the dependent variables. finally, the remaining four questions of the study were answered by the results of correlational and regression analyses of these variables. the results of the study indicate that only two subtypes of the metacognitive strategies were correlatedwith non-literary translation ability. monitoring strategies and orchestration of cognitive strategies were the only metacognitive strategies that correlated positively with the participants’ non-literary translation abilities. regression analysis was also run to see whether any of the metacognitive strategies could predict performance on non-literary translation. the obtained results indicate that non-literary translation ability can be predicted by monitoring strategies and orchestration of cognitive strategies. considering non-literary translation ability, the study did not find any significant relationship between planning and evaluation strategies and this ability. thus, neither planning strategies nor evaluation strategies were the best predictors among metacognitive strategies in the success of non-literary translation. in the qualitative phase,the present study incorporates retrospective think-aloud interviews as the data elicitation technique to probe the metacognitive strategies employed by 10 senior b.a. and m.a. students of english translation while translating a text from english to persian. this phase was done to confirm the findings of the qualitative phase. as this study aims at bridging two fields of inquiry – metacognitive strategies and translation strategies, the results could be directly applied to translation classrooms. the findings of such an interdisciplinary study is promising in the sense that they could be a starting point for further research into devising and the application of different forms of strategic-based instruction and material to translation classrooms, the development of a translation strategies inventory, and the improvement of translation training programs and materials. furthermore, educational systems can use the result of this study in their attempt to improve translation teaching, learning, evaluation, material preparation and to help students develop their translation competence.