The Missing Link: Translation-Specific Research Methods

Translation-specific research methods are the missing link in many translation departments in the Arab world and beyond. The reason is simple: research methods in translation studies are a recent arrival in academia, recent even in the best institutions hosting MA and doctoral degrees in translation.

In the Arab context, we need to integrate this knowledge now. Of course there will be the usual resistance from the gatekeepers of existing, non-discipline-specific methods borrowed from neighbouring fields: philology, linguistics, comparative literature, even applied linguistics. It is good practice for every translation studies department to take up this initiative and update its curriculum.

Correcting a Misconception

It is time to confront the misconceptions that many administrators and faculty hold about translation in general and translation studies in particular. I personally took a big risk by enrolling in a faculty of education in Canada to do my PhD in translator education and training. Why? Because only in the educational sciences could I get solid training in research methods and methodologies. I adapted what I learnt to translator education and translation studies, and I have never regretted it. I updated my knowledge, learnt new methods, and found a new way of approaching research in translation and interpreting studies, especially the applied branch of the discipline.

Translation Studies Workshop at the British Institute in Amman

A recording from a translation studies workshop held at the British Institute in Amman, Jordan – a rare glimpse of translator training conversations happening in the region itself.

The Myth of Teaching 'Any Course' in a University

Teaching, learning and performing in a university have become complex, yet many academics ignore how much training and development they need to close that gap. Every field, discipline and profession requires its educators to acquaint themselves with the scholarship of teaching and learning specific to that field, whether history, medicine, the sciences, translation or business studies.

The 'comfort zone' tactic

The administration's favourite tactic, shuffling faculty across courses to get them out of their so-called comfort zone, works against learning and against students. The learner ends up with second-hand teaching and a disoriented, superficial grasp of the discipline. Worse, instead of designing and managing quality learning environments, faculty fall back on a decontextualised textbook that students treat as a sacred resource, and which is then called the recommended 'syllabus' or 'declarative content'. This is exactly the practice of the secondary school.

Teaching in HE is a discipline of its own

With the growing interest in the quality of university teaching and learning (alongside research), a wide and innovative literature has emerged in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Some universities, in Canada for example, now run credit-based postdoctoral training programmes to prepare PhD graduates and future faculty to teach in their discipline with a quality-assured approach. Instinctive, impressionistic and fragmented approaches to university teaching yield weak learning and performance outcomes. The stakes are higher still in professionally oriented disciplines such as medicine, engineering, and translation and interpreting.

The textbook trap

Teaching exclusively from textbooks is a prime example of weak pedagogy. It produces flat learning and assessment of declarative knowledge alone, with no attention to skills or to the sustainable, lifelong abilities that subjects like translation and interpreting demand. Heavy reliance on textbooks also breeds a pharaonic attitude in which the instructor believes he can teach any course the administration allocates, as long as there is a textbook. Wrong. This is ill-planned on the administration's side, and on the faculty side it de-professionalises teaching and diminishes the instructor's status. Nobody can teach any content once the bible of a textbook is taken away.

To keep the status of university instructors alive and kicking, they need to reflect on their practice, engage in classroom research, and manage their learning and teaching environment according to the guidelines and frameworks of teacher education: andragogy for adult students, and university-specific pedagogies.

Teaching is a profession

The instructor is a professional whose job is to design a customised learning environment that maximises students' learning and performance opportunities, aligned with contextual curriculum and course-level guidelines. That means careful, strategic choices by the course designer and manager (the faculty member) to create and mobilise thriving learning environments for specific learning outcomes. Responsible, dynamic adult students, not passive empty containers, will flourish in a rich, diverse and stimulating environment built on active pedagogies: problem-based techniques, project-based learning scenarios, collaborative learning and the like.

Takeaway: fewer textbooks, more thriving, stimulating learning and performance environments.