construction and validation of the translation teacher competency test and the scale of students’ perceptions of translation teachers

the major purpose of this study was to develop the translation teacher competency test (ttct) and examine its construct and predictive validity. the present study was conducted in two phases: a qualitative phase as well as a quantitative phase. in the first phase of the study, the author attempted to find out the major areas of competency required for an academic translation teacher. the second phase of study dealt with determining the predictive validity of ttct. for the first phase of this study, three international experts gave their comments and scholarly views about the required areas of competency for a translation teacher. on the completion of development of ttct, four local translation teachers took part in interview sessions. their interview transcriptions were analyzed by nvivo software. the major constructs of ttct was confirmed by the model generated by nvivo. according to this model, after the content analysis of transcriptions, 4 major themes were emerged. two of them were free constructs: teaching skills and content knowledge while the other two are tree constructs which linked to other related themes: methodology and translation competence. in the second phase, a sample of 562 translation students and 20 translation teachers participated in this phase of study. the teachers were university translation teachers of those from 5 different universities in mashhad, tehran, and esfahan who completed ttct. the students were senior translation students who were students of the same teachers who completed ttct. the major aim was to substantiate the predictive validity of ttct. to this end, first, the scale of students’ perceptions of translation teachers (sptt) was designed. sptt was validated by using exploratory factor analysis (efa). sptt validity was confirmed by structural equation modeling (sem). the internal consistency of the whole scale was measured with the cronbach alpha reliability estimate. moreover, using the cronbach alpha, the reliability of each factor constructing the validated scale was also examined. for the second part of the quantitative phase, pearson correlation and one-way anova were run between teachers’ scores on ttct and their scores that they had obtained from their students (sptt). the results revealed that, the teachers who were competent and successful by ttct, were also competent and successful teachers based on sptt, warranting predictive validity of the ttct.