De Vertaling als Schrijfvaardigheidstoets Voor Gevorderden

In European universities, translation from native to target language continues to be a commonly used testing tool in programs of modern language writing proficiency. The selection of native language texts that are used as source texts in the translation test and especially the question of determining their degree of difficulty are discussed in the first part of this article. Prediction of the difficulty of these texts proves to be rather problematic. In the second part of our article, we discuss and investigate the possible construction of short, efficient translation tests consisting of a relatively small number of items. The selection of these translation items can be based on the statistics that constitute the output of a traditional item analysis; such an analysis has to be performed on the translations of groups of students. Scores on these short tests correlate rather promisingly with the original translation scores. The selected items in the two texts we analysed in this purpose proved to be, for the most part, lexical problems.