Teaching Simultaneous Interpreting Fully Online

Last semester I taught the advanced simultaneous interpreting course to my MA students at SEU fully online. It is now delivered in a hybrid format, but the online run proved something: conference interpreting can be taught, and done, remotely.

I used the interpreting environment on Zoom (a paid feature) to teach the course. Students appreciated the experience of interpreting remotely, and it made sense to them that simultaneous and conference interpreting could be done this way. Zoom's conference interpreting facility was the right solution at the time. It met the training requirements and objectives, replaced the interpreting lab, and gave us no technical problems during the sessions.

I designed and developed this graduate course, which comprises 14 modules, 7 critical thinking assignments, 6 discussion points, and a mid-term and final exam. I am glad to have been involved in its design, development and implementation.

Post-Covid Curriculum: Competency Models, Not Textbook Models

Reviewing or developing programmes in higher education usually follows a highly bureaucratic, product-based pathway: documents, checking, more checking, more documents. Or else benchmarking, which too often means looking at what others did and copying it with slight modifications. That is not curriculum development.

The work institutions avoid

Real pedagogical and curricular engineering means collecting, documenting and saturating relevant data. It is not a pathway that higher education institutions, especially in the public sector, like to take. The same shortcut is followed in accreditation.

What competency-based review is not

There are many models for evaluating and modelling curricula, but the most suitable for the post-Covid context is the one that takes competency as its framework. What we privilege in curriculum evaluation or review is not:

• shifting or renaming course titles and content;
• modifying the outcomes or objectives on paper;
• the religious choice of a specific textbook as the condition for the programme to breathe and develop.

Reshuffle the process

Instead, in our view, the first thing to do is to reverse the order of work:

1. Document and identify the practices of the disciplines at stake in the local context, especially where a corresponding professional practice exists in the local economy and society.
2. Select and classify those practices to develop standards of practice. This information comes from data gathered through interviews, focus groups and surveys.
3. Sit down as a team and align disciplinary knowledge with what was collected from the profession, or from the real-life context of the discipline or content taught.
4. Select and categorise.
5. Only then build the content, activities, pedagogies, training modes and assessment methods, aligned with the newly engineered curriculum.

I hope this clarifies the point.

Research, Training and Practice: The Russian Dolls Allegory

St-Arnaud (1976) offered a striking allegory for the relationship between research, training and practice: the Russian dolls. The largest doll is the researcher, the middle one the teacher, and the smallest the frontline practitioner. His wish, back in the 1960s and 1970s, was for a higher education profile that integrates all three: research, teaching and professional acumen.

Ideally, the small doll grows into the large one, a researcher who has practised, taught that practice and finally conducted research on it. For St-Arnaud, the positivist approach holds little value in an educational context, especially when researching professionally oriented disciplines, if the researcher lacks both professional and pedagogical acumen.

The ideal profile

I believe the combination of all three dimensions is the ideal profile in modern higher education. Think of a medical doctor who practised for years, then taught medicine at university alongside daily engagement in research. The same goes for faculty in engineering or sports science. A researcher without practical experience and a tailored pedagogical approach for teaching their discipline looks ineffective in today's higher education.

The analogy applies directly to translation and interpreting faculty. A hybrid profile combining frontline expertise in the language industry, proven expertise in innovative training methods and pedagogy, and the acumen to do applied, evidence-based research would make the ideal faculty member in a translation department. Rare, but not impossible. I discussed this at length in my doctoral thesis (2017), and updated articles are in the pipeline.

One more point deserves exploring: how we report that we include research or professional scenarios in our teaching. In some higher education institutions this needs rethinking, because the point of integrating all three in one ecosystem, especially in open-ended professional disciplines, is neither made clear nor properly applied.