The Development and Validation of Demotivation in Translation Scale

Demotivation, as important concept in psychology, is in fact the dark side of motivation. Research into foreign language learners’ demotivation for their weaknesses in translationpractice has not been touched by the translation scholars. To this end, the researchers, first, distributed an open-ended questionnaire to 112 students majoring in translation studies atGhuchan Azad University, Mashhad Tabaran University and Mashhad Imam RezaUniversity. Having categorized the responses, they designed the relevant questionnaire consisted of 29 items in Likert scale. Then, during the pilot study, the questionnaire wasadministered to 120 students in Employing the exploratory factor analysis, Principal Component Analysis extracted 10 factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 which accountedfor 74% of the variance in the respondents scores. Due to the subjectivity of the criterion for selecting absolute value, the researchers decided to interpret only factor loadings with an absolute value 0.45 or greater on factors through which 4 items had been removed. A screetest suggested four factors could be extracted, and finally, the rotated component matrixillustrated the variables loaded in each factor so that the researchers came up with the newfactors consisting of 25 items. These new factors were named as Lack of Effort, Task Difficulty, Lack of Job, and Teacher Knowledge. The underlying reasons for selecting the above-mentioned labels for each factor were discussed.

Keywords:

construct validity , demotivation , open-ended questionnaire , translation studies