The Role of Motivation in Literary Translation Classes

Motivation is perhaps the most frequently used term for explaining the success and failure of educational tasks. Numerous studies have shown that motivation is a key to learning (Gardner and Lambert, 1972). However, such experiments give us an understanding of what motivation is and what the components of motivation are. But they usually fail to reveal that someone is motivated or how we can create, foster or maintain motivation. The correlative effects of three dimensions of students' motivational behavior (i.e., motivational intensity, learning preference orientation, and impressions about literary translation course) and their engagement in the course were examined. The analysis of data revealed that there existed a positive correlation between students' motivational behavior and their achievement. The findings proposed that students who were not properly engaged received less response from their teacher, which further undermined their motivation.