Knowing the difficulty level of a translation assignment is important in translation pedagogy, accreditation and research, as well as for the language industry. For instance, in process-oriented translation research, researchers have no standards to refer to when they choose test passages, and the texts used are diverse in terms of text type, length and, possibly, difficulty (see Krings 2001, 74). This makes it hard for one to evaluate the comparability of experimental results between these studies. For example, the use of different translation strategies in terms of type and frequency might vary depending on the translation difficulty level of the texts. Dragsted (2004) found in her empirical study that professional translators would adopt a more novice-like behavior during the translation of a difficult text than during the translation of an easy text. Thus, translation difficulty is an important variable in translation process research.

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