The aim of this article is to present the results of PACTE’s experimental research on the Acquisition of Translation Competence in written translation. The experiment described involved 130 subjects.
The results presented are those we obtained for the Knowledge of Translation (declarative knowledge) and Translation Project (procedural knowledge) variables, the indicators of which are the dynamic index and the coherence coefficient. A dynamic concept of translation is understood to be textual, interpretative, communicative and functionalist; and a static concept to be linguistic and literal. The dynamic index indicates the degree to which subjects’ knowledge about translation (declarative and procedural) is dynamic. In the case of the Knowledge of Translation variable, the coherence coefficient indicates the degree to which subjects’ approach to different aspects of translation is coherent. In the case of the Translation Project variable, it indicates whether subjects’ approach to the translation of a text is coherent with their approach to the translation of translation units.
We correlated the two variables’ dynamic index data to calculate the Dynamic Translation Index, which reflects the consistency of subjects’ concept of translation and their approach to specific translation problems. Additionally, we triangulated our Dynamic Translation Index results with those corresponding to translation acceptability.
