From Linguistics to Translation Pedagogy: A Journey Across Disciplines

The last couple of years have taught me a great deal about changing career direction: how to embrace the change, accept it, and benefit from it. A shift of field does not erase your earlier background; it strengthens it, because you start comparing and contrasting fields, approaches and epistemologies.

What Educational Sciences Gave Me

I was about to finish a PhD in translator training back home in Morocco. Then I came to Canada, started from scratch, and chose to enrol in the Faculty of Education rather than in linguistics and translation. It has worked well. It allowed me to think differently about my own domain, translation and interpreting. Educational sciences hold knowledge, methodologies and insights that can inform translator education, and a research methodology we can put to use in the field of language mediation.

Things became more challenging, and more interesting, when I decided to specialise in online learning, including distance education, for translator and interpreter training. It is a different world, though it shares some ground with the face-to-face classroom. I am still learning, and I intend to keep learning. In a few years I hope to offer the translation community innovative, and needed, training alternatives, methods and approaches.

Technology Is More Than a Tool

My experience as a freelancer, an in-house translator, a teacher and a researcher taught me to work in various contexts, virtual and face-to-face, and to use a range of tools and strategies to communicate. Technology should not only be a tool for translators to learn how to translate; it is also a means for faculty to teach differently. Yet teaching with technology in a face-to-face classroom is not the same as teaching in an online, technology-enhanced environment. It means a change in roles, new competencies and skills, and a move from teacher-centred to student-centred pedagogies.

In a connected, networked and digital era, we need to rethink our pedagogies and approaches. We need research-based knowledge, not only practice-based insight. That research may be transient, but it is still scientific knowledge, grounded in learning and design theories and in the literature on human-computer interaction. All of it can be fitted to translator training in the hope of arriving at an innovative approach that actually works.

I will keep posting here about my experience as a student researcher in new territory.