Intercultural Competence and Translation Performance: A Correlational Study in Translation Education

Abstract

Intercultural competence (IC) is usually regarded as an important factor for successful translation, especially when those texts contain culture-specific items. This quantitative correlation study identifies the students' IC levels and the relationship between their IC and translation performance in culture-loaded tasks. This study was carried out in a newly-built application-oriented local university in China. Participants were third-year students who majored in Business English (N = 133), and all of them were native Chinese speakers with English as their second language; 115 valid cases were used in the analysis. Two instruments were used: the Selfassessment Questionnaire on Intercultural Competence of Chinese University Students to measure students’ IC and a paragraph translation test with culture-specific items to evaluate their translation performance. Descriptive statistics were used to profile students’ IC across key dimensions, and correlational analyses were applied to examine the association between students’ IC and their translation outcomes. The results indicated a positive and statistically significant correlation: students with higher IC generally got higher scores on translation tasks requiring sensitivity to cultural references and the application of cultural knowledge for target-language choice. These findings provide empirical support for the pedagogical importance of cultivating IC in the field of translation. They emphasize the need for evaluation methods that prioritize not just linguistic accuracy and fluency but also IC when students engage with culture-specific elements in translation.