STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION IN DEVELOPING TRANSLATION COMPETENCE

Students' language learning motivation is an important factor to ensure the quality of higher education in Ukraine in the context of its integration into the European Higher Education Area. The present study reveals the findings that showcase both pedagogical and psychological factors influencing students' foreign language learning motivation in translation competence. The authors used a set of basic theoretical research methods to analyze, synthetize and classify scientific and methodological sources on the research problem; empirical methods of questionnaire surveys with direct and indirect questioning to represent learning motivational characteristics, statistical analysis to summarize the research results. Both psychological and pedagogical diagnostics of the socially heterogeneous respondents' motivation made it possible to determine the external socio-cultural and internal self-concept motives in their self-improvement and self-regulated learning. It is established that the respondents' external motives have arisen due to such stimulating factors as "competitive advantage in the labor market" and "career growth potential". Internal motives are mainly related to the satisfaction of a student's personal needs in the foreign language learning (interest, awareness of the insufficient level of communicative competence, internal belief in the need for self-improvement of foreign language translation skills, etc.). Analysis of the diagnostics results provided an opportunity to distinguish the obstacles to the self-development of respondents in translation education. Experimental testing of the learning motivation within the internal and external mediation allowed to reveal the dominance of internal motives over external ones in all categories of respondents. Insufficient or low level of independent self-regulated learning has been identified as the main obstacle to self-improvement of foreign language translation competence. The paper contributes to the current understanding of translation education, especially in the context of Ukraine, by investigating factors influencing students' learning motives and their pedagogical and theoretical implications.