Students’ awareness of translation competence : a text-mining approach

This paper reports on an exploratory qualitative study investigating students' awareness of translation and translation competence through the course of English-Japanese translation workshop at the university level.To collect data, semi-open metaphor-making Sentence Completion Tasks (SCT) were given to 27 Japanese students enrolled in the workshop.The study explored how the images of translation formed with expertise and real-life translation experience, which was led into their awareness of translation and translation competence.An attempt was made to analyze the students' SCT text data by quantitative content analysis, or text mining, and to visualize it by lexical co-occurrence networks, using KH Coder.The results showed students' images at the beginning included the perceived degree of difficulty of translation, complex and challenging work of translation, but also fun in experiencing it as well.The post-survey results are indicative that translation experience helped them obtain a more diverse and richer image as well as become more sensitive to what it takes to do good translation work.