Traditionally, translation research has been qualitative, but quantitative research is becoming increasingly important, especially in translation process research but also in other areas of translation studies. This poses problems to many translation scholars since this way of thinking is unfamiliar. In this article, we attempt to mitigate these problems by outlining our approach to good quantitative research, all the way from research questions and study design to data preparation and statistics. We concentrate especially on the nature of the variables involved, both in terms of their scale and their role in the design; this has implications for both design and choice of statistics. Although we focus on quantitative research, we also argue that such research should be supplemented with qualitative analyses and considerations of the translation product.
