on the relationship between linguistic, visual-spatial, interpersonal intelligences and technical translation quality

abstract this study tried to investigate whether there was any significant relationship between technical translation quality of the senior english translation students and their levels of verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial and interpersonal intelligences. in order to investigate the research questions, the researcher selected a hundred senior english translation students from three universities of mashhad. a technical translation production test and a multiple intelligences test were administered. according to the results of the study, it was revealed that the students with higher verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial and interpersonal intelligences had higher technical translation scores, or they had a better performance in translating technical texts. the students’ technical translation quality scores can be predictable by their linguistic, visual-spatial and interpersonal intelligences scores. the linguistic intelligence score can predict the score of technical translation quality more than the other two intelligences. the male students were not better in translating the technical texts than the female students or vice-versa. the male students got higher visual-spatial intelligence scores than the female students, but the female students got higher interpersonal intelligence scores than the male students. as the issue of multiple intelligences and its application in the field of translation studies is new and considered as a new invention, translator-training institutions, companies, syllabus designers, teachers of translation courses and authors can benefit from the pedagogical and industrial findings of this study. key words: linguistic intelligence, visual-spatial intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, technical translation, quality of translation, gender.