Stop Training Translators for a World That No Longer Exists

A dangerous misconception persists in higher education: that translation and multilingual communication are linear, bilingual text-transfer tasks, a mechanical exchange in which a source text goes in and a target text comes out. That outdated assumption leaves legacy academic programmes fundamentally misaligned with reality, now that large language models (LLMs) handle basic linguistic transfer with ease.

From Transfer to Workflow

To remain viable, universities in Canada and the GCC alike must dismantle this legacy framework and rebuild their programmes across their theoretical, conceptual, practical and professional dimensions. We must move from the traditional transfer paradigm to a dynamic workflow paradigm (Andani, 2025). That means shifting our theoretical foundations away from simple bilingual equivalence and towards a process-oriented cognitive partnership (Simbolon, 2024), in which the human is elevated to strategic architect of complex, technology-driven language ecosystems.

What Is at Stake

On a practical and professional level, treating translation as a mere text-matching exercise does a profound disservice to students, regional economies and vital social institutions. In Canada, robust human stewardship is a legal and democratic safeguard, protecting systemic integrity in public health, law and multicultural inclusion against the risks of unchecked algorithmic output.

Across the GCC, language services are a strategic national asset driving economic diversification and Vision 2030 initiatives, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Safeguarding cultural dignity, regional nuance and "face" in Arabic demands sophisticated human intervention that generic, Western-centric AI simply cannot replicate.

Takeaway

Our pedagogy, or andragogy if you prefer, must pivot away from rote error correction and towards training highly specialised linguistic engineers equipped with advanced AI literacy, prompt engineering and risk-based auditing skills to drive the global knowledge economy. Legacy courses, translation studies and specialised translation courses included, need thorough epistemological revision and redesign. We are dealing with different concepts and constructs. We need to upskill our competencies and upgrade our conceptual framework in translation.

Curriculum Is Conversation: The Hidden Curriculum of Course Allocation

It has been a while since my last post; my reflective faculties were temporarily suspended, as happens for many reasons. Today I want to raise an issue that keeps coming up among colleagues in pedagogical and educational networks, particularly in the MENA region: the way 'hidden curriculum practices' are managed within departments.

'Operational Practices' with Unearned Legitimacy

This concern is far less prevalent in countries where the identities and well-being of faculty and administrators alike are acknowledged and respected. In the forums I follow, there is palpable dissatisfaction. Administrators tend to call these practices 'operational and local', which grants them a legitimacy they have not earned, especially when we recall Applebee's (1996) argument that curriculum is conversation, above all in higher education.

Assigning a Course Is Not an Administrative Act

It is not enough to hand a course to a faculty member without a meaningful dialogue, and without a proper look at their CV and professional profile. At college and university level, administrators frequently apply curriculum practices left over from K-12 schooling, which is inappropriate. It may serve the administration's interests by fostering a hierarchy that undermines faculty autonomy, usually justified as 'unit, faculty or departmental needs'. Administrators must invest more in the selection and allocation process: understand instructors' profiles, talk to them, and stop relying on exclusively quantitative and meaningless variables. Assigning a course without essential quality assurance criteria is fundamentally anti-pedagogical.

Faculty communities across the region confirm this, if not extensively. I can attest to it myself, having visited and worked in universities where such practices are widespread, with only a few exceptions. Those exceptions probably reflect the cultural beliefs and philosophy of each institution.

L'approche-programme – The Programme Approach to Curriculum Design

A video introduction to the approche-programme, a way of thinking about a degree as one coherent programme rather than a stack of separate courses – a useful lens for anyone redesigning a translation curriculum.

Watch: a new approach to curriculum

Understanding by Design in Arab Higher Education: How Far Are We?

Understanding by Design is a fine example of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Does it work in the Arab higher education context? My honest answer: we are a very long way from believing in, accepting and implementing that approach in our region.

What Holds Faculty Back

The main obstacle is the intention, deliberate or not, to strip faculty of their identity as professionals, reflective practitioners and action-research leaders. That is what prevents higher education educators in our region from innovating and engaging in transformative educational exchange. We still live under policing, inspection and negative monitoring practices that demolish our potential to make sense of what we can do, and to launch it in research, teaching and community engagement.

A better approach is to attract competent faculty with professional, grounded experience in the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, and to discard the curriculum practices inherited from the early 1960s, which were designed for schools, to control large numbers of children and monitor teachers excessively. Changing the vision and approach is key. Faculty hold PhDs, not BAs, and many have pedagogical training or long experience in academia topped up with professional development in teaching adults. Institutions need to limit the irrelevant interventions camouflaged under the umbrella of quality assurance. Quality assurance is not an administrative matter alone.

Quality Assurance Should Address the Source

Quality assurance needs to tackle the source of the problem: pedagogy, faculty profile and commitment, and support for those who believe in innovative ways of addressing complex problems in higher education. Industrial models can contain production and industrial operations, where machines and technology can be used and controlled. That is not the case with humans. Paperwork, policy and administrative tasks are time-consuming and should be handled differently, not piled onto faculty.

What to Do

Give educators ongoing, relevant and customised training in current higher education practice, not practices inherited from industrial models of primary and secondary schooling. Pedagogical practice is not something handed down from your former teacher, nor is it ad hoc; there is a whole body of scholarship behind teaching and learning in higher education. Read the literature. If we engage with it, the excessive and tiresome negative monitoring will not hold.

So recruiting the right profiles is step one. They may be costly. That leaves a choice: protect our standing as a university and climb to higher ranks, or stay as we are, implementing practices that will produce no positive outcomes locally or globally.

The video below is an example of the kind of endeavour and philosophy that needs to be adopted if we are to intervene differently in higher education.

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.

Improvement Science and Higher Education Pedagogy

In 2021 I approached the Faculty of Education at Western University about enrolling for a second PhD. At first the idea seemed crazy and unreasonable. Yet I wanted to take on the challenge, against all odds, and what made me want to go further was the new area of inquiry my prospective supervisor suggested: improvement science in education.

The missing link

This emerging field aligned closely with the orientation of my first PhD, on curriculum and pedagogical practices in higher education. I felt I had found the missing link. Improvement, per se, of pedagogical and curriculum practices in higher education in Qatar, and subsequently in other contexts in the region, was exactly what my earlier doctoral work had been about.

A few months later, sadly, heavy family responsibilities and pressures forced me to put the adventure on hold. I am now considering either resuming that path or engaging in a self-directed study of the field, with a view to publishing on curriculum and pedagogy improvement.

Why improvement matters now

What troubles me about improvement in higher education is the persistence of traditional, standardised pedagogical and curricular patterns. With Covid, things seem to be moving in the right direction: new post-Covid modes of instruction, assessment and intervention are a case in point. Teaching and learning environments are changing, so this is the moment to improve curriculum and pedagogical practice and to lead inquiries into it. Teachers, faculty, administrators and trainers need a new mindset. We might even move beyond the boundaries of pedagogy and start applying the concept of andragogy: how adults learn in professional and self-directed contexts.

In my own case, advocating a competency-based approach to curriculum development and design is itself an appeal to rethink curriculum practice. I doubt mainstream public universities will buy into it for the moment, but the private college and university sector would surely be keen to explore it, as would universities that favour experiential and field-, profession- or market-related forms of training and learning.

Improvement should start in basic education and move up the ladder to higher education. It is not just a tool or a practice, but a philosophy and a vision to be adopted and believed in.

Does Competency-Based Education Spell the End of the Textbook Empire?

I have worked in four universities in the Gulf, and in three of them I lived through the renewal of existing programmes or the approval of new ones. One traditional habit appeared every time, especially in EFL and translation programmes, and even in education courses themselves: the rush to recommend textbooks, as if the entire knowledge frame lived in one or two books. I never once heard an institution use the word "competency" or "competence".

Why Competency Models Are Rare

Perhaps the competency model does not sit well with traditional publicly funded universities. They follow a curriculum paradigm that has run for over 150 years, inherited from primary and secondary schooling, and it usually leads to graduate unemployment and stagnation.

Competency models demand hard work, pedagogical engineering skills and ongoing updating. They prepare students for real, authentic, lifelong abilities. They are more dynamic and more rewarding for the twenty-first-century generation. They stress the link between society, the economy and the educational institution, and they require teachers and faculty to design learning and performance environments tailored to specific student needs, market demands and national priorities. It is a different world, and a more challenging one. Without genuine pedagogical know-how, faculty will struggle to engage with a competency model.

In EFL, authentic, customised, context- and work-oriented learning and performance environments, enhanced with experiential and project-based pedagogies, seem to be the way ahead.

Takeaway

Research is needed to revamp our curriculum practices and create meaningful learning and performance activities for our students. Linking with the world of practice through research and development is a key requirement in this endeavour.

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.

Conflicts and Tensions When Departments Rethink Curriculum

My journey through education studies and technologies since 2011 has let me identify and scrutinise many curriculum practices along the way. With an interdisciplinary profile combining translation and interpreting studies with the educational sciences, I have encountered, in the English and translation departments I have worked in across the Arab context, many conflicts between colleagues over curriculum and didactic issues in translation, interpreting, literature and language teaching.

Before 2012 I had no critical, polished view of such practices. Over the last two or three years, though, I have come to understand that the claims made in the research literature on translator education, translator training and translation and interpreting programmes make sense. Valid and sound sense, I must say.

The University Is No Longer an Ivory Tower

Every department, college and university has its inherited practices, no doubt. Yet for national and international quality assurance and benchmarking, there is an urgent need to develop and, in many cases, transform those cultures to achieve the outcomes set by national frameworks. The university is no longer an independent ivory tower; it carries social and economic responsibilities. Translation and interpreting programmes, like others in the humanities and social sciences, have to deliver those socioeconomic outcomes. They are no exception.

Content Versus Competencies

My conclusion so far is that the vast majority of programmes, perhaps all of them to some degree, still practise the academic, theoretical model of curriculum. It is a curriculum practice that prioritises content and courses over competencies (knowledge, skills, and behaviours or values). Such curriculum philosophies focus on which courses to delete, add or merge, with no reference to the knowledge, skills and behaviours students must have acquired by the end of the programme to ease their entry into the workplace and society.

The alternative, competency-based curriculum design and development, requires knowledge and expertise in instructional design, or what some countries call ingénierie pédagogique, literally pedagogical engineering. It is not a conventional way of doing curriculum. Yet national and international frameworks are pressing universities to deliver more practical, market-oriented curricula. These practices rely on information gathered from a range of stakeholders before it is aligned and modelled inside the university.

Why Change Is So Hard

Attempting this at an early stage of change management in a university can produce chaotic results at every level of the institution, faculty level above all, unless there is bottom-up decision-making, rather than top-down, and the political will to support change gradually. It is especially difficult where the status quo at faculty level has never been challenged, and where faculty have never been asked to rethink their practices in light of changes in higher education, internationalisation, globalisation and the market's demand for employable profiles.

Competency-based curriculum practice begins its design phase by collecting data on specific themes tied to students' employability and sustainable abilities. Those elements are barely considered within the theoretical, academic model, where faculty take the leading role in deciding which "courses" or "content", rather than which "competencies", form the baseline of curriculum design. That is the fundamental point of disagreement in many departments that set out to rethink and reconceptualise their programmes after review.

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.

Curriculum Development Needs Evidence, Not Intuition

Authors with long experience of teaching translation and interpreting in the Arab world (Atari, 2012; Farghal, 2009; Taibi, 2016; Mehrash, 2003) have warned of a wide gap not only in curriculum design but in its development and implementation in translation and interpreting programmes.

In our review of literature and practice in the region, we found that curriculum work in many translation units and departments at Arab universities is carried out exclusively by committees whose core scholarship is rarely in translation studies, and who rarely possess the pedagogical know-how and know-what of their discipline-specific didactics. Arguing about moving, adding or deleting courses is an old pattern of curriculum development. In discussions with colleagues, you will notice how little reference is made to:

• what the scholarship of training, learning and teaching in a university context says;
• what the scholarship on translation and interpreting pedagogy says, including findings from recent studies on similar issues in other countries;
• what the profession or market needs (surveys, interviews, focus groups);
• student profiles and needs (surveys, focus groups, interviews);
• employer needs (surveys, focus groups, interviews);
• what translation pedagogy says about curriculum practice at every level of development, design and implementation across countries and cultures, and on what principles and criteria to base decisions about the how and the what in the classroom.

Our dear colleagues argue from inherited experience, intuition and ad hoc criteria. No frameworks, no evidence. Things need to change. Curriculum reviews must be taken seriously, and colleagues need proper training in the scholarship of teaching and learning, including curriculum theory and practice, so that their reasoning rests on evidence.

Curriculum practice in higher education can be divided into three models (see Calvo, 2011): the theoretical and academic model, which our universities have followed for more than 90 years; the professional model; and the eclectic model, which is what a university should adopt, with more weight on the professional side in postgraduate programmes.

Takeaway: when discussing curriculum, refer to the scholarly literature as well as to departmental and personal needs. Both matter.

Textbooks or Powerful Learning Environments?

Institutions, departments and universities prefer their faculty to deliver courses from textbooks. As we know, this aligns with the traditional teacher-centred approach that is no longer accepted in educational contexts, least of all at college and university level. What hypocrisy. So why does the practice persist?

Why Textbooks Persist

First, a misunderstanding of how learning works, combined with the drive to maximise student intake: to maximise profit in the private sector, or to meet government targets to enrol nearly every student, as in the regional universities on the peripheries of Saudi cities. Instructors are then left with no option but textbooks and transmission methods, regardless of whether students reach acceptable levels of learning or acquire the market-ready abilities they need to enter the workplace smoothly.

In a student-centred context, by contrast, the focus is on building and designing a thriving learning environment that engages students and trainees in the educational experience. To achieve that, class size should not exceed 18 students, and sometimes fewer, as in interpreting.

Second, some colleagues, and this is true not only in Arab higher education but also in countries with long traditions of university teaching and research, find the textbook method simple and easy, and most likely inherited it from their own instructors. Yet pedagogical know-what, know-how and know-why are essential for quality outcomes in any educational programme. So is alignment with current scholarship, both in the discipline and in teaching and learning, if we want to deliver distinctive learning experiences.

When it comes to coordinating courses, miscommunication and misuse of syllabuses follow, because some colleagues are current and pedagogically savvy while others cling to the way things were done before, or to concepts that are now outdated and need rethinking. The victim, of course, is the student. Translation and interpreting research and practice have moved fast in the last three decades.

The Alternative

Innovative instruction built on sound pedagogical principles and educationally sound tools adds value to the teaching mission and to student learning and performance. It becomes even more compelling when students see the relevance of classroom practice during their internships. Aligning in-class practice with professional needs is crucial in university programmes, and translation and interpreting programmes, graduate and perhaps undergraduate too, are a case in point.

Takeaway

We need powerful learning environments in our professionally oriented translation and interpreting programmes, to maximise the student experience, guarantee a smooth entry into the profession, and, why not, produce effective, reflective researchers as well.

Teaching Audiovisual Translation: A Gulf University Exchange

One of the best ways to advance translator education and translation studies is for our community, academics, professionals and future members of both, to talk to each other: through social media, online forums, meetings and conferences. That exchange of ideas, experiences and innovative approaches to teaching, practice and research empowers everyone in the profession.

Here is an example: an exchange between me and a colleague who had been assigned a course I taught the previous semester at a Gulf university, Multimedia Translation II (Advanced Audiovisual Translation). I was a visiting lecturer there for one semester, and I was the first to design and teach the course for that department. It was also the first time I had taught such a course.

His Question

Your course content seems largely technical, which calls for having technological resources in place. It is evident that you did a challenging and hard job.

However, I would like to share this with you and have your valuable feedback. Don't you think the course content could be geared towards highlighting the strategies employed by translators in subtitling and by interpreters? I feel it would be more straightforward and practical to focus, in this higher-level course, on what translators and interpreters do and what roles they assume in the media. This can include showcasing and discussing audiovisual and online samples. I have done some research work on Reuters translation, which may be relevant here, when compared with that of other media, say, Al Jazeera. Film subtitles can be another topic, whereby cultural norms condition and constrain translation, e.g. principles of politeness.

My Reply

I invested a great deal of time and effort in conceptualising the course this way. I took into account the student profiles and needs, as well as the local and regional professional practices I had already documented in my ongoing doctoral study. Class size was another factor that conditioned the design, the activities, the teaching mode and the assessment tools: I favoured a workshop, coaching and training mode over lecturing. Two of the four enrolled students wished to pursue a Master's in AVT at the TII the following year, and that too shaped the design.

The ICT element was integrated to support that hands-on, coaching mode. I placed many open e-resources on Blackboard for students to draw on when solving terminology and documentation problems. I used videos to explain the mechanics of subtitling: at first no subtitling software, just educational videos demonstrating how manual subtitling works, then software to train them to caption (or transcribe) and subtitle the captions. Students liked cartoons, so I used some (Arabic/English), along with news reports and documentaries, where speed is regulated. I focused on enhancing students' instrumental and reflective competence, supported by the technical material above and by knowledge of audiovisual translation from the literature (Diaz, 2007).

Another phenomenon related to audiovisual translation is audio interpreting, and even video (remote) interpreting. This is an ongoing practice in the profession, and I felt students needed to be introduced to it. Multimedia translation is a diverse phenomenon; it is not only subtitling, as students tend to think. To back this up I referred to recent publications in the field and to best practices published by professional associations and formal consortiums or forums.

Your plan sounds rational and clear, and you may well follow it. As I see it, it makes sense for an undergraduate minor programme: comparing media samples and case studies, and highlighting strategies and techniques. You are a translatologist, and you know what you will provide for the students. Such content would be another way to run the course, though different from mine.

Did you check with Prof. X whether she addressed that point in Media I? I remember her saying she covered that kind of declarative knowledge in Media I, working mostly on written texts (newspapers, advertising). What I did in Media II was extend and enrich the course by adding two missing practical elements: the profession and technology. As a minor course, it only introduced students to these areas, without the depth that a major or a professionally oriented BA or MA programme could offer. You might also diagnose the students' needs; it may help, if you want to do it.

I have said a lot here, but I hope you now have a clear picture of the mechanics and the ideology, the pedagogical rationale and intended learning outcomes, behind the design. It is up to you to model the course as you prefer. Your proposal sounds great and makes sense. But please check with Prof. X about Media I to avoid redundancy or misalignment.

Misconceptions About Translation Studies in Arab Universities

Over nine years working in translation units and departments in the Arab context, I have encountered many ways of conceiving translator education in university programmes, and many ways in which colleagues, administrators and even students picture the discipline and its practice, in academia and in the workplace. In the past I could not muster solid, scientific arguments to challenge those conceptions. Having completed my doctorate, after some six years of interdisciplinary scholarship in applied translation studies and educational sciences in Canada, specifically curriculum and pedagogy in higher education, I can now draw on both the declared (theoretical) and grounded (practical) scholarship on translator education worldwide, and in the Arab context in particular.

Why This Is Alarming

What I found is sad and alarming. Nothing is more dangerous than procuring derailed knowledge and engaging students with worn-out, outdated, underdeveloped and one-dimensional concepts, processes and epistemologies of multilingual mediation and services. These concerns do not affect MA programmes alone. They affect BA students, whose foundation of concepts, practices and processes feeds the master's level.

The Introductory Course Problem

Take the introduction to translation course in any of the BA programmes I have worked in. They predominantly share the same content and the same conventional delivery. Students risk being introduced to a short-sighted view of translation: the translation of short texts, usually decontextualised or selected at random, with no pedagogical rationale governing the choice.

If a programme aims to produce market-ready graduates in translation or interpreting, that first course should be the key starting point. Instead of teaching students to read and translate mini-texts, we can introduce them to a different environment in which they acquire skills and abilities that build up over the four years of the BA into a fair level of translator competence. Rather than stressing text types and rigid, product-based assessment, students should be introduced to:

• information mining and documentation tasks across a range of resources, so that they understand their material;
• basic tools and translation technologies to support their work;
• building glossaries and term banks into databases they can use everywhere, as students and as working translators;
• basic post-editing of machine translation output;
• basic knowledge of how translation memories work;
• an introduction to basic practices in the translation profession, including business skills.

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.

Translator Education Must Start at the Undergraduate Level

If we want translators who are more than skilful scribes, their education cannot wait for the MA. It needs to start at the undergraduate level.

More than language service providers

Teaching translation and educating translators at undergraduate level matters if the programme's vision is to supply the economy and society not only with skilful language service providers and competent technical scribes, but with critical agents and savvy human resources who engage with multilingual services as professionals and diligent reflective practitioners.

Involvement in multinational communication and relations calls for intercultural experts: people acquainted with the historical, cultural, social, political, ethical and experiential fundamentals and traditions of the practice itself, whether translation or interpreting. It is a universe of knowledge and practice with its own specifics and a wide body of scholarship (see the development of translation theory and translation studies since the mid-twentieth century). So why sideline it?

A discipline in its own right

Translation therefore needs to be approached in its full, fundamental dimension, not treated as a supplementary element embedded in neighbouring disciplines such as literary and language studies. The fact that many universities worldwide offer doctoral degrees in translation is a sign that we should revise our programme structures and designs where translation as an activity and discipline is concerned, especially at universities with no tradition of offering BA programmes in it.

Competence takes time

Last but not least, translation is a set of skills, knowledge and abilities that take time to construct and appropriate. An MA programme, with its logistical and administrative restrictions, will certainly not be enough to produce human resources with such competencies. It all comes down to how we perceive the activity and the discipline: as a set of interlingual, intercultural, behavioural and instrumental competencies to be upgraded, or as a set of competences that combine skills, knowledge and abilities and must be built from the ground up.

Introduction au cours TRA1061 : Traduction économique et financière – Introduction to Economic and Financial Translation

The introductory video for TRA1061, a course in economic and financial translation – a good example of how a specialised translation course can be framed for students from day one.

Declared, Hidden and Operational: Three Curriculum Cultures

University curriculum practice has largely replicated the traditional curriculum development paradigms of primary and secondary schooling, above all the rational, theory-based approach. Its focus is content and academic knowledge, with at best an average and often a marginal place for vocationally or professionally oriented content and competencies.

In Gulf and Arab higher education (North Africa and Morocco, for example), this traditional approach has become standard practice (Atari, 2012; Gabr, 2001, 2007).

Three curricula in every department

Curriculum development recognises three predominant types of curriculum practice:

• The declared curriculum: the official, announced curriculum of the institution. It is what is on paper, usually produced by a committee that undertakes no exploratory or experimental research before making curricular or pedagogical decisions.
• The hidden curriculum: the internal departmental politics surrounding particular tracks or programmes and their constituents (content, courses and faculty).
• The operational curriculum: what actually takes place in the department or the college at large.

Competencies first

Today's curriculum approaches, even in academic university settings, rely fully or partly on the competency model instead. Competencies, meaning an integrated set of knowledge, skills and behaviours, come first. Then content and textbooks, if available. If not, competent faculty draw on their pedagogical skills to design appropriate learning and teaching environments for the newly chosen content.

This model answers national visions that link outcomes to the job market, and it delivers sustainable outcomes and performance. It is an arduous, time-consuming process. But its practicality, and its responsiveness to international accreditation standards and requirements, cannot be denied.