Investigating the use of resources in the translation process

The use of resources plays an important role in the translation process. Despite the increased adoption of translation technologies by professional translators, on average they spend as much as one-third of their actual translation time on various external consultations. From a methodological point of view, investigating the use of resources in the translation process has proven to be a difficult task, even in the relatively uniform working environments of the pre-Internet era. Now that most external resources have moved from paper to online and have recently started to merge into the complex, heavily technologised translation environments, these investigations have become even more demanding. The present chapter explores the various challenges of carrying out research into the use of external resources over the last few decades and presents a methodology for carrying out such research in the complex translation environment of today. It shows how the adoption of the multi-method approach enabled a multi-dimensional exploration of research behaviours of translators in their natural working environment and facilitated the subsequent classification of these behaviours in a Typology of Translator Research Styles (TTRS)