In the study quoted above, Quinci (2024) compared first- and second-year legal translation trainees’ time management strategies and their use of external sources while translating and post-editing a Power of Attorney. She found that first-year students’ delivery time was shorter than that of second-year students because they were resourceless: they were unsure about how to use the time available. In addition, they spent proportionately more time on searches than their older mates, but paradoxically, they could perform a smaller number of searches than the older students. These data can be interpreted as signs of inefficient info-mining behaviour. Qunici (2024) also notes that novice students may have spent much of their time learning about the topic and disentangling the language of the document. The type of sources first-year students used was also very limited, featuring general, non-specialised sources (web searches, general monolingual and bilingual dictionaries). In contrast, second-year students exhibited a more efficient use of time, meaning that they spent most of their time on drafting and revising the target text. Moreover, they performed a larger number of searches within a shorter time than first-year students, and they used a more diverse range of sources than their younger peers (e.g., specialised background texts, concordancers) (Quinci, 2024).

In an exploratory qualitative study, Sales (2023) asked 156 professional translators and interpreters in Spain about their views on information competence. Her findings indicate that professionals consider information competence to be a key element of translation competence and support its training in university degree programs. In addition, they stressed that students need help in developing their information evaluation skills (Sales, 2023).