The impact of a metacognitive self-regulation inventory in translator self-training: a pre-post study with English-Chinese translation students

Abstract

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of repeated use of a metacognitive self-regulation inventory (MSRI) in translator self-training. Designed by the researchers, the MSRI includes the cognitive management strategies of planning, monitoring and evaluation. A pre-post comparison study was conducted with two groups of students. The data obtained from students’ responses to the inventory, think-aloud protocols (TAPs), post-task interviews, and translation products assessments were analysed for triangulation purposes. The results show that an MSRI can be used as an effective tool for translator self-training. Specifically, repeated practice with the inventory in students’ self-training processes can effectively increase their awareness of metacognitive self-regulation by diagnosing their strengths and weaknesses, assist them to transform declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge, promote top-down processing mode, and eventually influence the balance of their patterns of metacognitive self-regulation. Furthermore, the strengthening of metacognitive self-regulation encourages students to pay more attention to the communicative function of the translation, and ultimately enhances their translation quality, particularly in the aspects of clarity, vocabulary, morphosyntax, genre conventions, and translation’s purpose and target audience.