Examining Anxiety in Translator Trainees

At the recruitment stage, the participants completed the questionnaires on their personal background and their score of CET-4¹ as well as their score of translation in CET-4. In order to ensure the participants with similar English proficiency level, a pre-test was conducted with suitable translation tasks and the participants with total scores above 18 points were enrolled. In the formal experiment, after each participant was informed of the test steps, the subjects were positioned at their stations in accordance with the necessary guidelines to ensure that the experiment was not adversely impacted by the physical movement of the participants. During the experiment, the participants did the translation task and output the translation in the right window of Translog II User. And the monocular mode of the SR Research Eyelink 1,000 plus system was used in this study, so only the right eye of each participants was tracked. After completing the translation task, the participants immediately filled out a BAI scale based on their personal physiological symptoms and evaluations. During the experiment, the participants were not aware that anxiety evaluation would be provided after the translation tasks, otherwise, they would not totally focus their attention on the translation task. Moreover, if they had known that they would evaluate their anxiety after the translation task, they might think of some strategy to show their confidence. If that happened, we would never collect the true data for their anxiety.