Towards educating the emotionally literate human translator: development and validation of a scale for measuring the emotional literacy levels of translation students in the age of AI

The technology-induced emotional challenges drive an emotional turn in translator education. While emotional intelligence has attracted growing attention, emotional literacy, which offers a more useful conceptual lens, remains absent in Translation Studies literature. To fill this gap, this study introduces an original, theoretically grounded Emotional Literacy Scale for Translation Students (ELSTS), developed and validated to measure the emotional literacy levels of translation students. Following a multi-stage procedure, an initial pool of 48 items was generated based on existing literature and expert review. Upon establishing content validity, and face validity, through piloting the scale with 80 undergraduate students, the ELSTS was further validated with a sample of 289 students. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were subsequently conducted, confirming a one-factor scale with satisfactory psychometric properties. The final scale indicated high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.96) and convergent and construct validity. The results revealed that only 28.4% of the students demonstrated high emotional literacy, with the majority showing low to moderate levels (71.6%), providing empirical evidence for the need to educate translation students as ‘emotionally literate human translators’ in the age of AI.