Expert web searching skills for translators – a multiple-case study Urszula Paradowska Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Zawodowa w Gorzowie Wielkopolskim Abstract This paper presents partial results of a multiple-case study of English to Polish translation students who enrolled in a three-semester undergraduate translation course in western Poland. The author analyses the students’ web searching skills before and after a 4-month intervention. The research question the author addresses is whether and how the increased expert searching skills developed by the students influence their search speed and accuracy. In a broader context, this paper constitutes a part of a research project that examines the development of information competence in undergraduate translation students. Introduction Recent years have seen a growing reliance on technology in translation. From start to finish, the translation process typically includes receiving a job via email, consulting web-based and electronic resources, seeking advice from online forums, using CAT software to speed up the process and ensure consistency, and finally, emailing the finished translation to the client. The ability to use Google at an expert level, nicknamed Google-fu, is now a market requirement. In response to this reality, more and more translation trainers share the view that student translators need to develop web searching skills (Gambier 2009; Gouadec 2007, p. 91). The need for incorporating information competence in translator education is also highlighted by the multicomponent models of translation competence developed by PACTE and EMT, among others, (PACTE 2009; Gambier 2009), whose theoretical considerations are followed by empirical studies such as the InfoliTrans model (Pinto Molina and Sales Salvador 2008). Web search behaviour, i.e. “performing goal-driven actions aimed at meeting information needs for translation problem solving” (Enríquez Raído 2011, p.62), is usually limited to the use of information retrieval (IR) systems such as popular search engines, which provide a simple and direct way of searching information for various resource types (Youngok Choi 2010, unpaginated). Aula and Käki (2003) found that expert searchers formul ate queries with multiple search terms, often refine their queries, and use the ‘Find’ function. They also use many tabs to retain the context while searching and store temporary and final search results in a separate file. In this paper, the author presents partial results of a multiple-case study of undergraduate English to Polish translation students who enrolled in a three-semester undergraduate translation course in western Poland. The students represent a fairly homogeneous sample with an even representation of males and females with similar ages, domain knowledge, and language proficiencies. The students’ Web searching skills were analysed before and after a 4- month intervention carried out in the third and last semester of their translation course. During the intervention, the student translators received a theoretical background and practice in online information seeking, which focused on translation stages, expert search behaviour, increasing domain knowledge, web-based resources, Google search operators, MS keyboard shortcuts, and ways of storing search results. The author addresses the question whether and how the increased expert searching skills developed by the students influence their search speed and accuracy, expecting the results to