| Sumario: | Directionality and difficulty are useful tools for investigating what takes place in the "black box" of the translator's mind. When examined together, directionality and difficulty shed light not only on the translation process, but on the participants and the methodology as well. In this study, eight beginning translation students translated two texts into their mother tongue and eight other students translated the same texts into their second language. The effect of directionality on three measurements of difficulty is examined: time spent, number of keystrokes, and the translators' subjective assessment of task difficulty. The data show that translation into the mother tongue requires less time but more keystrokes than does translation out of the mother tongue, and is considered to be less difficult. There is also far more variation among the participants working into their mother tongue. The correlations between the three measurements of difficulty were weak or nonexistent.
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