Employability and Workplace Practice in Translation Programmes

Employability is crucial for any educational system that wants to deliver significant outcomes for society. Institutions that take it seriously strive to align their programmes with the world of work, reviewing them internally and externally to improve content, pedagogy and other educational practices. The quest for improvement is ongoing, and so it should be in these complex and unstable times.

The 'ghost' concepts

In classical higher education contexts, particularly at university level, concepts such as 'employability', 'workplace practices', 'technology', 'market', 'experiential learning and training' and 'professional practice' are less welcome, and are usually viewed with suspicion, above all in the humanities and social sciences.

Yet these 'ghost' concepts can be integrated into our programmes smoothly, given the intention and the leadership to innovate and to engage in professional development. For instance, one should:

• Study case studies that use professional training modes of instruction, and see whether one or more of these practices can be transferred into the discipline. Business and management sciences are a good source.
• Read the didactics of your own discipline. You cannot be good at pedagogy without training and constant reflection on your classroom practice, online or face-to-face. Active, action-based methods from the teaching and learning sciences can inspire practices that enhance learning and engage students.
• Take a course on teaching in a university context, or on andragogy, to understand the dynamics of teaching adults and how they learn. Andragogy is not pedagogy, and professionally oriented disciplines are not the same as traditional humanities or social science disciplines. In other words, engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning.

The ivory tower has changed

Colleagues in the humanities and other disciplines (educational sciences apart) tend to look down on any pedagogical element in their practice. Yet in today's higher education this element has become a necessity. Things have changed in the world of the ivory towers: the professional, the pedagogical and the technological will prevail, and even more so after Covid. Content no longer holds the monopoly and prestige it enjoyed for the two hundred years or so since the modern university model emerged.

Translation and interpreting is a case in point, and the same applies to any other field. Kiraly (1995, 2000, 2006, 2016) revolutionised applied translation studies by making sense of the teaching and learning of translation. Before him, there was no systematic way of organising the translation classroom.