My Journey from  The Human to  The Social Sciences...From linguistics through to translation to educational sciences...and now educational technology... and ending in translation pedagogy.

The last couple of years had taught me many new aspects related to how you can embark on a change in career, and how to embrace, accept and benefit from it...Even strengthen your previous background and make comparaisiona and contrasts between fields, approaches, epistimologies....ect.

The educational sciences had taught me grounded knowledge. I was going to finish my PhD in Translator Training back home in Morocco, but then I came to Canada and started from scratch and opted to enroll at the Faculty of Education instead of the faculty of Linguistics and Translation. It seems to work better, it allowed me to think differentelly about my domain (Translation/interpreting ). There is knowledge , methdologies and insights in educational sciences that could well inform translaor education/training, as well as a methodology that we can use in the field of language mediation.

Things became more challenging for me (yet interesting) when I decided to specialise in online leanrning ( including Distance education) related to translator / interpreter training. It is a different world. I learnt few new things...yet related in some aspects to face to face classroom contexts. I still learn, and will keep learning. I hope in a couple of years to be able to benefit the translation community with innovative , yet demanded,  training alternatives, methods and approaches.

My experience as freelancer, in-house translator as well as teacher and researcher taught me how to work in various contexts ( virtual, face to face), use various types of tools and strategies to communicate ... I can confess that technology should not only be ' a tool' for translators to learn how to translate , but also a means for faculty to teach in another way...still , teaching with technology in a face to face  classroom is diffrent in manyways form teaching in an online technology -enhanced virtual environment : change in roles, necessity to learn new competencies and skills to use the technology, adopting student centured pedagogies instead of teacher centured ones..ect.

In a connective, networked and digital era we need, I guess, to rethink our pedagogies and approaches ...we need research based knowledge, rather than just grounded and practice-based insights.These should overwhelm our way of doing things....We need  research proved experiences, despite the fact that this researach may be transient and temporary...still, it will be scientific Knowledge based on learning and design theories coupled with litterature on computer-human interaction .  All this will be fitted in translator training in the hope to get an innovative and working approach and methodology.

I will keep posting in this blog all my experience as a student researcher in a new territory....Keep checking!

Fouad