Translation competence has been one of the most popular research topics in translation studies in the past 30–40 years. In spite of the large number of publications, research on translation competence is far from complete and there are a large number of undiscovered territories in the field. In particular, high-quality empirical studies that not only rely on existing theoretical models, but take into account at least a number of the background factors that influence translation performance and have a systematic design are rare. Particularly scarce are longitudinal studies, as they do not pay off: in the world of “publish and perish” it is not profitable to conduct research for several years without the opportunity to publish something, as results come only in the later phase of the research. In addition, because of the high drop-out rate, researchers take on a considerable amount of risk when starting their research, as they never know whether they will be able to complete it or not, and even if completion is successful, the amount of data remains unclear until the last data collection wave is over. Against this backdrop, Carla Quinci's book comes as a pleasant surprise that deserves praise not only for its methodological rigour but also for the author's courage to undertake longitudinal research.

At present, Carla Quinci is a research fellow at Padova University, and the monograph under review is the revised version of the author's PhD-dissertation. Quinci's main research interest is translation competence, its constituents, its functioning and the didactics of developing translation competence. Recently, she has shown interest in studying some aspects of machine translation and implementing it in legal translator training.

The volume is divided into three sections, Theory, Research and Practice. Section 1 provides a theoretical foundation for Section 2, which forms the backbone of the book. It is the description of a longitudinal study on the development of translation competence with 63 participants. The research report is followed by a practical part that focuses on supporting practicing translator trainers by giving practical advice (Section 3.). The sections are further divided into chapters and references can be found at the end of each chapter. The printed version of the book contains an index, but no appendices. Space restrictions may explain this decision (see note 5. on p. 72), which must have been made by the publisher. Nevertheless, this is one of the shortcomings of the book: it is not only the questionnaire that readers cannot inspect, but the source texts and sample translations, sample corrections etc., too. This definitely impacts the evaluation of the present research itself, and its replicability, too.

As the primary aim of the book is to present a research project on the development of translation competence, for a start, an extensive overview of translation competence and its development must be provided. In line with this, chapter 1 focuses on the conceptualization and modelling of translation competence. The chapter begins with differentiating between translation competence, on the one hand, and (monolingual) communicative competence, bilingualism, and expertise in translation, on the other hand. The conclusion is that translation competence is a not an inborn ability, but a learnt one, that is qualitatively different from monolingual communicative competence and bilingualism (sic!). Expertise is seen as the highest form of translation competence. Although we more than agree with the author's conclusions, the terminology she uses is somewhat confusing. On pages 4‒6 she keeps contrasting bilingualism and translation competence. As translators are, by definition, bilinguals, it would make more sense to contrast trained and untrained bilinguals, or even better the translation competence of trained and untrained bilinguals. On a theoretical plane, bilingualism and translation competence are not even comparable as bilingualism is not a single competence, but a linguistic umbrella term.

Next, the author reviews definitions of translation competence and decides that multicomponential definitions are the most common and accepted these days, consequently, she goes on to overview these models. These include the PACTE model, the TransComp model and the EMT 2009; 2017 models. In addition, Alvés and Goncalves's cognitive model, Prieto Ramos's legal translation competence model and the PETRA-E literary translation competence model are presented, too. These models are also seen as ones relying on empirical data. Reflecting on empirical research, the author highlights the fact that most empirical evidence is process-oriented and only relatively few studies were carried out with a focus on the translation product.

In Chapter 2, Quinci discusses models and empirical studies on translation competence acquisition. If empirical studies on translation competence are scarce, then ones on competence acquisition are largely non-existent. Quinci suggests that the primary reason for this is that development can only be examined longitudinally. Inevitably, a longitudinal approach is superior in any research that tries to reveal changes over time. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to use cross-sectional studies in psychological and educational research to unveil developmental trajectories. With a large number of participants and appropriate statistical methods, cross-sectional studies can actually bring reliable results. When investigating the acquisition of translation competence, the problem is just that it is extremely difficult to reach the necessary number of subjects for statistical analysis. Moreover, because of the complexity of the translation activity, the amount of background variables is almost unmanageable. This means that even basic research projects in competence acquisition are likely to be extremely complex, time- and energy-consuming. In addition, translation projects are usually underfinanced, so it is no wonder that researchers usually look for more feasible projects. With this in mind, it is highly commendable that Quinci ventured on this journey of longitudinal research.

Nevertheless, again, a word of caution concerning terminology may be needed here. The author uses the term “simulated longitudinal research” for what is usually called cross-sectional research in the social sciences (i.e. collecting data at the same time from different age groups) (see e.g. Paltridge & Phakiti, 2015 or Rose, McKinley, & Briggs Baffoe-Djan, 2020). An internet check suggests that her term is indeed used sometimes, but much less frequently than the word ‘cross-sectional’. I would think it is not advisable to use the term “simulated longitudinal research”, and not only because its meaning is not evident (unlike that of cross-sectional) for most researchers, but it is also somewhat misleading (i.e. blurs the clear distinction between longitudinal and cross-sectional).

Chapter 2 gives an account of the existing models of competence acquisition and the most important findings of research projects linked to these models. Thus, Király's model, the PACTE project, the TransComp project, the CTP project, and Kumpulainen's empirical study are presented. The complexity of translation competence, the small number of the studies, and the very specific contexts they were carried out in, make it very difficult to synthesize results. One common finding seems to be that development is not linear, but rather cyclical and disruptions or stagnations in the process are not uncommon either. There seems to be much less agreement on when, how and what subcompetencies improve, how their interactions change and how much time the whole process takes. The chapter ends with the introduction of the European framework for the acquisition of translation competence and with the description of the competence levels in the acquisition of literary translation competence.

The theoretical overview covers all the relevant models and theories and does it as briefly and as clearly as possible. Nevertheless, there is no indication as to which definitions and models the author builds her study on. Also, it is somewhat puzzling that the term performance, which is originally by definition linked to competence, is not dealt with. The term seems to be somewhat neglected in translation studies, in general, although both process- and product-oriented research actually gathers data on performance, and it is just deductions that are made about competence relying on performance data.

Section 2. (Research) begins with a chapter describing the research design. The author establishes a niche in the research field based on the literature reviewed in the previous section and defines her general aims and objectives. In short, she tries to reveal how the translation product (i.e. the target text) and the process (i.e. some indicators of the process) change as a function of experience. The sample consisted of 63 translators, who were classified into three groups, novices (BA students), intermediates (MA students) and professionals. The study had a longitudinal design with six data collection waves. At each data collection point, subjects translated a non-specialist newspaper article of about 350–400 words from English into Italian. Lexicometric measures and the quality of the target texts were analysed and compared across data collection points. This part of the research was product-oriented. In addition, in every data collection wave, subjects had to fill in the same questionnaire. The questionnaire included process-related and competence-related questions, and had two versions, one for trainees and one for professionals. The aim of the questionnaire was to collect information on the translation process. The participants were allowed to use any resources they wanted to and had access to the Internet, too. They could also use their own laptops but the there was a time constraint of 120 min on the translation tasks. Students worked in a classroom setting and professionals worked on Moodle. Data analysis involved both qualitative and quantitative methods and relied on both manual and semi-automatic techniques. It should be noted here that no statistical analysis was attempted, although the volume is rich in quantitative analysis. The lack of inferential statistics, however, impacts the generalizability of the results. This will be explained later.

The research design and its implementation are impressive, particularly, if we take into account that it is the work of just one individual researcher. With that in mind, some minor methodological shortcomings must still be pointed out. As the author herself admits, using different source texts in the different data collection waves has its own risks, because at this point we lack techniques to ensure that the selected texts are equivalent, and not only from the point of view of difficulty. Clearly, the author did everything to ensure that the texts have the same level of difficulty, although some of the techniques she used could be criticized, just like the decision to use newspaper articles as source texts.

Similarly, choosing questionnaire as a technique to study the translation process sounds somewhat odd, too. Obviously, Quinci is aware of this (see her comments on pages e.g. 59 or 202.), too, which suggests that it was simply not feasible to collect process-data in real time within the framework of this project. Yet, I would think that questions like how difficult the ST was, whether the allotted time was enough, what the main types of difficulties were (see pp. 64–65) are questions that can often be found in follow-up questionnaires that try to uncover participants' perception of the task. As such, they are very important and valuable questions, but are also qualitatively different from real process-data.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 present the research results. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of the relevant research question(s), which is followed by short theoretical explanations of terms and concepts that were not included in the first two (theoretical) chapters. In addition, methods of data analysis applied with the actual data set are explained in detail.

Chapter 4 tries to answer the question how textual patterns vary with different levels of translation competence. To do so, the author calculated lexicometric measures (e.g. type/token ratio, percentage of hapax, mean word frequency), lexical density and lexical variation, length variation (differences in length between source text and target texts, number of explicitations and implicitations), and readability indices. This was accompanied by analysing vocabulary use, syntactic variation, nominalisation, activisation and passivisation. This is definitely the most original and the richest part of the research, even if doubts may arise why certain indices are used or how they are interpreted. When looking at the process of analysing the data, it must be highlighted that, although there is an abundance of longitudinal and cross-sectional data, the researcher focuses on cross-sectional comparisons, that is, comparing the different competence groups. True longitudinal analysis, that is, observing how textual patterns change for the same individual (or the same group) over time is somewhat in the background, if present at all. This is true for data analysis in the following chapters, too. Nevertheless, these cross-sectional findings are extremely valuable.

After analysing her data, the author arrived at the conclusion that novices' target texts were usually lexically richer, but less explicit than those of the other groups. Their texts were also characterized by extreme syntactic complexity (i.e. long sentences) and accordingly, with low readability. Intermediates were at the other extreme in the sense that their translations tended to show the lowest level of lexical richness and the highest level of explicitness. Professionals adopted a middle position concerning explicitness and lexical richness, while their target texts had the highest readability scores.

When evaluating these findings, two things must be considered. On the one hand, as statistical tests of significance were not carried out, we cannot be sure that differences are not due to measurement error. As a result, findings remain hypotheses, until further studies confirm them or until the author performs statistical tests on her data. On the other hand, the genre of the texts used seriously limits the generalizability of the results (even if they were confirmed by statistical tests).

In chapter 5, results of quality assessment and their relations to levels of translation competence are reported. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the major dilemmas of translation evaluation. Quinci arrives at the conclusion that both adequacy assessment and error analysis are essential, so she included both in her study. Adequacy assessment in this context means checking the acceptability of the translation solutions of pre-defined rich points, and scoring them. With this evaluation method extraordinarily good solutions can be rewarded. Rich points were selected by six participants and two experienced translator trainers. This way, the validity of the evaluation tool is ensured. However, reliability was not checked, the author simply suggested that the same method proved to be reliable for PACTE. It is important to note here that reliability is the quality of a particular assessment tool (this time, it is the actual list of rich points). The fact that one list proved to be reliable in one context (PACTE) does not automatically mean that another list in another context will be reliable, too. As a result, reliability must always be checked.

Solutions of rich points were rated by three assessors, which, again, indicates high quality methodology. Nevertheless, interrater reliability was not checked.

For error analysis, Quinci developed her own system, which was a combination of Mossop's classification of errors and Vollmar's severity scale. It is not known who identified the errors and what steps were taken to ensure (interrater) reliability.

Results of translation quality assessment indicate that the higher the competence level of translators, the better the quality of their translations. The error type that clearly differentiates between more experienced and less experienced translators is accuracy. In other words, professionals' translations tended to be more accurate than students' translations. In addition, translator training seems to reduce the differences between students. Here, we must note that the specific context could have influenced findings, and thus they cannot automatically be generalized. In particular, the research was done at a particular training site, and the levelling out of competencies can be the characteristic of that particular training. Similarly, text-type and language pair may have had an effect on the error type that emerged as a discriminating factor between professionals and non-professionals.

From a methodological perspective, an interesting question would be whether there is a correlation between adequacy assessment and error analysis. If there is, then it would be enough to use only one technique in future research.

In Chapter 6 questionnaire data and delivery times are analysed. The self-report questionnaire included questions, among others, on perceived text difficulty, main types of difficulties in the source text (e.g. lexical, syntactic), perceived adequacy of time allowed for the translation task, self-assessment, information on the reading strategy used when reading the source text, the number and types of resources used, and the type of revision translators engaged in in the last phase of their work. As this list suggests, the questionnaire yielded immensely rich and interesting data. It was shown that novices and professionals were the fastest translators, and in general, all participants were satisfied with the time allocated for the task. Perceived text difficulty was negatively related to translation competence, that is, the higher the level of competence, the lower the perceived level of difficulty. Also, translators at a higher competence level tended to identify more complex difficulties in the source text. Professionals' use of reference materials was also different from that of novices. Interestingly, professionals used a smaller variety of resources, and mainly mono- and bilingual dictionaries. As for revision strategies, novices were more likely to engage in unilingual self-revision (i.e. reading and revising the target text only), whereas more experienced students and professionals performed comparative revisions, sometimes combined with monolingual revision.

The most interesting finding in this chapter is, perhaps, the one related to self-assessment. Data analysis showed that novices were pleased with their own performance, whereas the self-confidence of intermediate students was somewhat lower. Professionals, again, were more similar to novices in that they rated their performance higher. These findings seem to replicate the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, according to which people with limited competence tend to overestimate their abilities (Dunning, 2011). This is a phenomenon many of us who are active in translator training know so well, but evidence for it from translation research has not been provided yet. It should be noted, however, that mean differences between the groups are extremely small, and again, without significance tests, there is the likelihood, that they are simply measurement errors.

In Chapter 7, the author synthesizes her main findings, and relying on the findings she offers guidelines for translator training. The suggestions resonate with what trainers know from experience and as such, are not necessarily groundbreaking novelties (e.g. trainees should develop self-monitoring skills, should learn how to distribute attention and cognitive effort etc.). What makes the attempt unique is that the suggestions are backed up by empirical evidence. At the end of the chapter, Quinci overviews the strengths and the limitations of her study. Large sample size, longitudinal design, an extraordinary amount of data generated and the development of guidelines for translator training are mentioned as strengths. Limitations include the relatively short time span of the study, the methodology used for collecting process-data (i.e. self-report questionnaire), the fact that the study involved only one language pair and that not all possibilities of product analyses were realized. I would add the lack of statistical analysis as a major shortcoming and confusing cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis throughout the book, in the second place. Further research ideas are put forward at the very end of the chapter. These involve replicating the research with other text genres, language combinations and directionality, analysing further textual variables and analysing “within-group data” (p. 204), which basically amounts to true longitudinal analysis, which was not carried out in this book.

Chapter 8 is unique in an academic volume in the sense that it tries to connect theory and research findings to educational practice. In the introduction to the chapter, it is suggested that advice would be given on how to develop trainee's actions in the three phases of translation (orientation, drafting and revision). However, looking more closely at the chapter, we see that the author addresses just one activity in each phase, so in this sense, it would be better to say that the author gives advice on how to develop reading skills, research skills and revision skills in students. What makes this endeavour so exceptional is that the choice of skills and abilities to be developed is based on the author's research results. The suggested activities are not always linked to the problems discovered in the study, but it does not actually diminish their values. The chapter can be seen as consisting of three parts, each centring around one skill: reading, research and revision. Each part begins with a brief theoretical overview, explaining the significance of the relevant skill and outlining the potential challenges associated with its performance. In addition, some guidelines and principles related to the development of the skill are provided, too. This is followed by a list of activities that can be used in translator training. Chapter 8 can be used independently of the rest of the book, and even those who are not particularly keen on research but are active in translator training might find it very useful.

In summary, Carla Quinci's book has the potential of becoming one of the classic empirical studies in translation research. The relatively large sample size, the rigorous research design, and the abundance of variables studied systematically make it unique, even if minor inconsistencies can be detected in the way the research is reported. We must not forget, however, that because of the highly complex nature of translation competence, it is basically impossible to carry out “flawless” research on it. At best, we can strive for that and in this book, an excellent attempt was made resulting in significant findings.

One might wonder whether it is not too late to publish (and read) a book on the development of translation competence in 2023, the same year when we witnessed an explosion in AI. In fact, machine translation and post-editing have been integral parts of the translation industry for years, and with that in mind, it may sound even more unusual to study just classic translation competence. We should not forget, however, that the data collection of the research reported in the book took place between 2012 and 2014, which means that the research must have been designed around 2011, when MT was already around but its spread and impact could not be foreseen. The elapsed time (more than 10 years) highlights the incredible amount of time that is needed to complete a longitudinal empirical study. But it also shows how absurdly slow academic publishing is. Nevertheless, as there is definitely an overlap between translation competence and post-editing competence, and as the research methods used for translation competence can be transferred to studying post-editing competence, the book is unquestionably timely and relevant.

The volume can be recommended to scholars active in the field of studying translation competence, to students who wish to pursue research in translation (or post-editing) competence and to trainers who are open to very practical ideas that can be used in the training process.