Using electronic information resources to solve cultural translation problems: Differences between students and professional translators

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of electronic information resources to solve cultural translation problems at different stages of acquisition of the translator’s cultural competence. Design/methodology/approach: A process and product-oriented, cross-sectional, quasi-experimental study was conducted with 38 students with German as a second foreign language from the four years of the Bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and ten professional translators. Findings: Translation students use a wider variety of resources, perform more queries and spend more time on queries than translators when solving cultural translation problems. The students’ information-seeking process is generally less efficient than that of the translators. Training has little impact on the students’ use of electronic information resources for this specific purpose, since all students use them similarly regardless of the year they are in. Research limitations/implications: The study has been conducted with a small sample and only one language pair from a single pedagogical context. The tendencies observed cannot be generalised to the whole population of translation students. Practical implications: This paper has implications for translator training, as it encourages the development of efficient information-seeking processes for the resolution of cultural translation problems. Originality/value: Unlike other studies, this paper focusses on a specific translation problem type. It provides information related to the students’ information-seeking strategies for the resolution of cultural translation problems, which can be useful for translation training.