The interaction between text difficulty and translation accuracy

Assessing source text difficulty for the purpose of translation is of utmost importance in selecting texts for translator training and examination. However, very few guidelines exist on how to select texts according to level of difficulty and little empirical research has been carried out in this area to inform educators and translation accreditation bodies. This paper presents the results of a data based study on English source text difficulty when translated into Arabic and Spanish by students of the University of Western Sydney, Australia. The paper extends on the results presented in Campbell & Hale (1999) and attempts to answer the following questions: 1. What kinds of lexical items and syntactic structures appear to cause most difficulty to translate according to the different alternative renditions produced by the subjects? 2. Is there a correlation between the number of choices available to the translator and the level of accuracy of translation? and, 3. If there is not a perfect correlation in (2), what implications are there for our understanding of the notion of translation difficulty?