Investigating translation competence in graduates of Jordanian universities

Acquisition of translation competence as well as evaluating it within a training context has gained momentum among translation scholars. There have been different theoretical and empirical studies on what translation competence is and how it could be evaluated. This paper reports an empirical study which investigates the competence of translation graduates in Jordan from the points of view of three different role players: namely, translation final year / final term students (FYTS),1 translation instructors and the employers in the translation market. The study reveals a disjunction between the self-evaluation carried out by the final year / final term undergraduates and that of the instructors and the employers. While the FYTS (graduates-to-be) reflect a positive evaluation of the progress they have made in their translation competence, instructors and employers believe that recent inexperienced graduates lack several aspects of that competence. Students and instructors were sampled from five different universities while employers were sampled from forty two different translation service providers in Amman, Jordan. Questionnaires were administered to the three different groups of respondents. The structuring of the questionnaires is basically guided by the componential model of translation competence developed by PACTE (2000, 2003) which views competence as a set of integrated and interrelated sub-competences comprising bilingual competence, extra-linguistic competence, instrumental competence, strategic competence and knowledge about translation.