Developing and validating involvement in translation scale and its relationship with translation ability

The concept of involvement has not been touched by professionals in Translation Studies. The present study aimed to develop and validate a scale of involvement in translation and to examine its relationship with students’ translation ability. In so doing, altogether, a pool of 20 translation teachers and 120 translation students participated in the study. Initially, the researcher tried to elicit the most commonalities from translation teachers regarding students’ involvement in translation. Then, the reliability and validity of the designed scale were determined by means of Cronbach’ Alpha, Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling. The validated scale was named Involvement in Translation Scale, including four underlying constructs. Finally, the results confirmed that there was a large, positive correlation between students’ scores on involvement in translation and their translation ability [ r = .72, n = 40, p < .05]. Translation students are suggested to focus on those aspects of their translation that foster their immersion in translation practice.