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The purpose of this study is 1) to test whether students’ vocabulary knowledge, reading competency, and topic knowledge form a significantcomponent of students’ translation performance and 2) to explore thevarying degree of effects each component has on students’ translationperformance. To this end, 60 undergraduate freshmen taking atranslation course were measured on their general vocabulary knowledgeand reading competency and on the degree of familiarity with two textswith distinct topics. The students then translated the two texts andwere evaluated on their translation. Statistical technique of multipleregression was used to investigate the relationship between students’translation performance and the three variables mentioned above. Theanalyses showed that students’ general vocabulary knowledge andreading competency independently had a significant effect on translationperformance, while the students’ topic knowledge was found not to havea significant effect. Of general vocabulary knowledge and readingcompetency, general vocabulary knowledge explained largerportion(19.9%) of the variability in students’ translation performance thanreading competency(12.8%). Vocabulary knowledge and readingcompetency combined explained for 20.7% of the variance. Implicationsof these findings on translation programs for undergraduate students arediscussed along with suggestions for future studies.