Abstract

This paper presents two studies that focus on translation students’ perceptions at undergraduate level at a Spanish and two Chilean universities. Both studies aim to improve translation education. The first study analysed the students’ self-efficacy beliefs at the undergraduate degree in Translation and Interpreting offered at the University of Granada. To do this, a quasi-experimental field design and a mixed-methods approach was employed to study the development of the students’ self-efficacy beliefs and to discover and analyse their perceptions of a) the teaching practices that influenced their self-efficacy beliefs during their education as translators, and b) the reasons why this influence occurred (or not). In the second study, the students’ perceptions were explored using a qualitative method, namely the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), which fostered the understanding of the development of translator identity of students at the Translation Studies undergraduate programmes at Universidad de Santiago de Chile and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. This paper describes both approaches and highlights the relevance of employing approaches with a strong qualitative component to gain access to the psychology of translation students. In other words, these approaches go beyond most quantitative approaches which have traditionally been used to study these perceptions.