Competence in Translator Education Is Not as Abstract as It Seems

Accreditation bodies accredit a programme according to very specific guidelines and criteria. Field-specific reviewers scan the programme at the content level and end up deleting, adding or recommending courses. Old-fashioned curriculum evaluation was essentially about changing course content, as if curriculum were a game of chess with courses and recommended textbooks, with perhaps a scan of objectives and outcomes at most.

More Than Moving Courses Around

Not so. Other major factors are at play, not only administrative ones but the "alignment philosophy" and the relevance of content, intended outcomes and any other type of competency (the intended skills, knowledge and abilities to be developed in students). Designing programmes and learning outcomes on the competence model remains a challenge in many higher education contexts. It is a question of funding, policy and a change of mindset.

The challenge is thornier still in the humanities and social sciences. The competence model of programme design and evaluation is most established in scientific and professional programmes, in fields such as agriculture, medicine and engineering, where hands-on skills and abilities can be clearly documented from the profession, then redesigned and modelled into a curriculum that first aims to develop competencies and only then identifies the content that feeds them. That is an entirely different mindset from the usual methods of building, designing and evaluating curricula in higher education.

And in Translator Education?

My first suggestion is to stop stressing only the traditional focus on the product, the text. Let us bring in translator competences as well. After all, who is the agent, producer and deliverer of the outcome, whether translated text, video or audio? The human being: the translator, the subtitler, the interpreter.

In fact, translation competence is becoming an outdated topic in applied translation studies. Let us move on. The PACTE group has been discussing it for years and has run a longitudinal inquiry for two decades. Kiraly, Göpferich and Chesterman have added competencies missing from PACTE's predominantly cognitive model. We should now also be discussing translator competence, instructor and faculty competence in translation, competence in translation curricula, and more.

Internship, Practicum or Fieldwork? Lessons for Translator Education

Some programmes in the social and human sciences include a practicum or field training before the BA, the MA or, in some cases, a diploma. It gives the learner, the trainee or the novice teacher a chance to gain work-related competencies, although the time allowed is usually not enough, for institutional, planning or strategic reasons.

What I Saw in Qatar

In my doctoral research on two university-based programmes in Qatar, I explored the internship and fieldwork dimension. At the time, the team was developing a guide and protocol to ensure that future translators and interpreters received adequate training through the internship before graduation.

Yet the support provided to those students needed further work. It is not easy for a multilingual professional under heavy pressure to deliver projects on time while also monitoring students who have never worked in a hectic professional environment. The competencies needed in that real-life context are usually psychological, non-linguistic, attitudinal and aptitudinal, and they combine, as in teacher education, with facing a class for the first time and making sure the pedagogical dimension is properly handled.

The Dual-Education Model

In Canada, pre-service teachers, future multilingual providers and learners on other professional programmes engage in dual education: an internship in which they alternate between work (training) and study. Students are at once future professionals and ongoing learners. Their learning becomes authentic, contextual and experiential, and it leads to pertinent outcomes.

Competency, Not Content

Under a competency-based rather than content-based curriculum, the planning of teaching and training should prioritise the list of competencies (knowledge, skills and behaviour) that matter most in the students' learning and performance curve. New and innovative content should be stressed, because traditional content in the social and human sciences usually does not sit well with the competency model. And when we say content, we must add pedagogy and the provision of a thriving, relevant and significant learning environment.

It is not about a textbook. It is about a learning environment that empowers the learner. Textbooks are only one part of that complex yet coherent and connected environment.

Can Experiential Learning Work in the Liberal Arts?

A few years ago I worked at a university in the Middle East whose English department was going through accreditation. From what I heard, the university or the accreditors demanded that the literature and linguistics units demonstrate how experiential learning could be applied in their courses. Faculty in the liberal arts faced a real challenge.

An intruding paradigm

Experiential learning usually lives in the sciences and in professionally oriented programmes such as engineering and medicine. Bringing this 'intruding' paradigm into the unfamiliar terrain of the liberal arts was not easy. Courses that could not integrate an experiential dimension were prone to extinction, and possibly to the closure of the unit itself, whether literature, poetry or drama.

I had a broad idea of how experiential learning could be applied in translation, interpreting, business studies, engineering and medicine. Beyond my own experience in applied languages, I had worked alongside peers in my doctoral research lab who were studying those very disciplines. In educational development, that is how it works: we bring the tools and techniques, then collaborate with subject-specific experts to get the job done.

Learning beyond the fixed room

In a classroom or lecture theatre, the context is confined to a fixed space and a limited time. Beyond it, learning can come from a visit to a heritage site or museum, from immersion in a good book, or from the workplace itself. My colleagues teaching drama, poetry and literature were bewildered about how to build experiential learning into their courses, since what the university wanted was proof of the economic and social relevance of the programme.

So I made some enquiries internationally, and found a professor at a Canadian university who had published three articles on this innovative model of teaching.