Abstract
As an English teacher at the Costa Rica Institute of Technology, I often see students from the Engineering and Business Administration majors struggling to understand study ma- terials and professional articles in English. Even though the students do not have any training in translation, they have to do this task in their regular classes. They usually use printed dictionaries or computer-assisted translation tools that have been designed for these purposes and that they can access. This observation led, as a result, to the interest in finding out if the students are really able to understand and translate a text from English to Spanish accurately. The translations are analyzed at the word, phrase and sentence levels to examine the comprehension level of the text and the quality of their translations.