Yang and Wang (2023) studied the effects of self-regulation, critical thinking and motivation on translation trainees’ post-editing performance. Self-regulation was selected as a target variable because it is seen as desirable for high performance. Critical thinking is essential in problem-solving and decision-making, which are key processes in post-editing, as translators must constantly decide whether to edit a segment or not. Finally, motivation was also hypothesised to have an influence on performance as it determines how much effort a person is willing to devote to the translation task. Interestingly, according to Yang and Wang’s results (Y. Yang & Wang, 2023), it was only self-regulation that directly affected PE performance, critical thinking and motivation exerted only indirect influence as they both had an impact on self-regulation. Yang and Wang’s research can be seen as a pioneering one in translation studies, not only because they focused on a seldom researched topic (affective variables in post-editing) but because of the methodology they used (structural equation modelling). Nevertheless, the study cannot be replicated because the questionnaire was not presented in enough detail. In fact, only one sample item was provided for each sub-scale (self-regulation, critical thinking and motivation), which makes it impossible to see and understand how the authors conceptualised the studied constructs.