Special aspects of formation of sight translation skills

Teaching sight translation is an integral part of translators' professional training, and it requires applying didactic measurements that increase students' motivation. The topic of didactic measurements in teaching sight translation is insufficiently developed in the contemporary international and domestic translation didactics and needs to be clarified. This paper aims to describe the didactic quantitative and qualitative measurements obtained and substantiated through applied theoretical and empirical research methods. The translation speed and evaluation of translation quality according to the scale of compliance with the norms of the target language are proposed as sight translation didactic measurements, which were identified and substantiated in the didactic experiment. The experiment involved 10 students in their fourth year of studying translation and interpretation at the Southern Federal University during the sixth and seventh semesters. The research describes relevant variables and results of the didactic experiment in sight translation training at the initial stage (4.2–4.3 printed characters per second). Translation speed was measured for translation from and into the foreign language in routine and stressful environments. Translation errors were analyzed, classified, and counted. The procedural difficulties of sight translation were observed and discussed with the students. Qualitative and quantitative measurements and their correlation in dynamics were compared. Diagnostic and boundary measurements of sight translation speed for the first year of translation training are proposed. Common and individual factors influencing the process of translation from the worksheets at the initial stage are found in the research; they include translation from or into the native language, the level of education, the speed of translation, the language pair, the stressful environment, the speed of reading, the density of the text, and the number of translation errors. It is proved that the speed and quality of translation in the course of the research grew unevenly, the speed of translation from a foreign language into Russian and the other way depends on the speed of reading in both languages.