BA Translation Programmes in the Gulf: A First Look at Course Outlines

A few months ago, as part of my PhD research, I surveyed the universities in the Arab world that offer degrees, diplomas or certificates in translation and languages. What their websites reveal, and fail to reveal, says a lot about how translators are trained in the region.

What I was looking for

For each institution I checked two things:

1. Whether it publishes a course outline showing the objectives, types of activity and assessment methods designed by faculty (or the institution) for a specific translation or interpreting course.
2. Where it does, whether those elements (objectives, activities and assessment) are aligned with one another. In other words, whether faculty and other stakeholders in course design are consciously aware of the dimensions and implications of what they have designed, above all for students' learning outcomes. By this I mean meaningful, significant outcomes, such as applying what students have learnt and creating something of their own from it.

Preliminary findings

The first round of this informal survey led to four conclusions:

• Course outlines are largely missing. Apart from a very few universities and colleges in the Gulf, most translation, or English and translation, departments publish no course outlines at all (see Atari, 2012; Buhmaid, 1995). For the sake of quality teaching and learning, programmes should display clear, functional and workable outlines that show the teaching philosophy adopted for translator training in that context, and whether teaching is teacher- or student-centred. This is an important criterion in higher education today. Translation is a multifaceted discipline, and it makes sense to design domain-specific pedagogies for teaching and learning it.
• Programmes lean towards teaching, not training. The content of the surveyed programmes is geared more and more to teaching rather than training or coaching. Lecture-based content is fine for first- and second-year students, but not for third-year students or finalists. This may be the case in the Arab world, but here in Canada students enter the real world of translation soon after the second semester and receive a mix of university teaching and workplace training during their internship. Context may decide the pedagogical planning we need.
• Too much theory, too little real world. The amount of theory in these programmes will not help in training future translation professionals. The real-world factor is missing: I hardly saw courses on research methods and documentation for translators, terminology extraction, language technologies, revision, professional aspects of translation or project management for translators. It is high time to renew the content.
• Pedagogical foundations are unclear. I am not yet sure whether faculty base their classroom practice on educational approaches or models specific to translator training at all, such as socio-constructivism (Kiraly, 2000, 2003) or constructivism, or on active pedagogies for organising practical translation work, such as problem-based learning (Cormier, 2007) or project-based learning (Gouadec, 2007; Kiraly, 2003, 2012).

For reasons of space I will limit my preliminary remarks to these four points. The remaining ones can wait for another post.