My Journey from  The Human to  The Social Sciences...From linguistics through to translation to educational sciences...and now educational technology... and ending in translation pedagogy.

The last couple of years had taught me many new aspects related to how you can embark on a change in career, and how to embrace, accept and benefit from it...Even strengthen your previous background and make comparaisiona and contrasts between fields, approaches, epistimologies....ect.

The educational sciences had taught me grounded knowledge. I was going to finish my PhD in Translator Training back home in Morocco, but then I came to Canada and started from scratch and opted to enroll at the Faculty of Education instead of the faculty of Linguistics and Translation. It seems to work better, it allowed me to think differentelly about my domain (Translation/interpreting ). There is knowledge , methdologies and insights in educational sciences that could well inform translaor education/training, as well as a methodology that we can use in the field of language mediation.

Things became more challenging for me (yet interesting) when I decided to specialise in online leanrning ( including Distance education) related to translator / interpreter training. It is a different world. I learnt few new things...yet related in some aspects to face to face classroom contexts. I still learn, and will keep learning. I hope in a couple of years to be able to benefit the translation community with innovative , yet demanded,  training alternatives, methods and approaches.

My experience as freelancer, in-house translator as well as teacher and researcher taught me how to work in various contexts ( virtual, face to face), use various types of tools and strategies to communicate ... I can confess that technology should not only be ' a tool' for translators to learn how to translate , but also a means for faculty to teach in another way...still , teaching with technology in a face to face  classroom is diffrent in manyways form teaching in an online technology -enhanced virtual environment : change in roles, necessity to learn new competencies and skills to use the technology, adopting student centured pedagogies instead of teacher centured ones..ect.

In a connective, networked and digital era we need, I guess, to rethink our pedagogies and approaches ...we need research based knowledge, rather than just grounded and practice-based insights.These should overwhelm our way of doing things....We need  research proved experiences, despite the fact that this researach may be transient and temporary...still, it will be scientific Knowledge based on learning and design theories coupled with litterature on computer-human interaction .  All this will be fitted in translator training in the hope to get an innovative and working approach and methodology.

I will keep posting in this blog all my experience as a student researcher in a new territory....Keep checking!

Fouad

Online teaching & learning of translation.....is it possible?

I still believe that translation practicums would better be faciltated using the information and techonology tools in addition a suitable pedagogical approach. Nowadays, we cannot imagine a translator or language service provider without being versed in how to use the internet and word processing, as well as other translation related databases and tools to process translation assignments of various sizes. Therefore , shouldn't we be thinking of designing progarmmes and learning environments to enable that type of virtual training...after all virtual translation or tarnslation practice in the clouds and within networks is a must for a 21st century language service provider.

Therefore, a set of competencies that have never been raised or tackled by translation curriculum designeers need to be put on the table and reconsidered to be embedded in translator tarining programmes. Linguistic and general knwoledge is not enough to build the translator of tomorrow, and the employers keep asking for other more important competencies that universities do not offer since they ' do not form part of the diciplinary courses'. How about social competencies ? using technology to translate or to train translators in parctical workshops using active pedagogies instead of lectures ...as well as  teach the content of translation using multimedia tools ...such as recorded lectures mixed with other technology enhanced methods to engage students and lifted them from the boredom of the 'lecture mode'?

The online environment will be a suitable space for the tarinee translator, since he or she will be working for the rest of his or her life in technology based environments and networking with clients and colleagues through navigating from one space in teh could into another . ...this is how the future workspace or workstation or how the working patterns will be for the future translator....so it is better to organize the knowledge base, resources, teaching methods and approaches and evaluation ( or quality) criteria to build a curricula or progarmme of study that can be either given fully online or in a blended mode ( mixing the face to face and the online mode)?

A very big portion of my PhD research is about this issue...I will send ymore and more briefings and reflections in this blog and share it with you. Your comments are welcome. 

The below article (attached) is written in Arabic. It tells us how source texts can be translated or interpreted (in a conference) regardless of the source text's phraseology or intentions. The iranian interpreter had to make major changes in President Murssi's speech (the egyptian president) to serve national (local) interests and protect its allies (Syria and resistence in Bahrain) by all means ...the 'equiavalence' phenomenon fails in this context.

This is an important topic in Translation Stdudies ( see under censorship, translation and ideology. Hence, the parctical aspect of Translation Studies .

http://www1.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=772294&SecID=12

Applied Translation studies ( Tranlator training and classroom research)

El karnichi, F. (2012). Issues in sdvsnced translator training at Moroccan universities. Turjuman,21(1), 52-65. Tangiers, Morocco.

Abstract:

Turjuman, Avril 2012, Vol 21 N° 1  p 54 - 67

 

Issues in advanced translator training programmes at Moroccan universities

Fouad EL KARNICHI

Abstract

Due to the lack of extensive literature on translator education and training at the university level in Morocco, there will be a brief highlight in this article on the situation of the teaching of translation in advanced courses of translation at the Moroccan universities. Reference shall be made to the available local scarce published literature in the country on translation teaching and support it with other publications and experiences in other parts of the world treating the same issue. This will give us a basic picture of the existing situation in the academic corridors in the country. We hope to benefit and cross- check the status of our syllabus, teaching methods and models vis-à-vis the fast growing innovations, findings and approaches in the discipline. The main focus of this article is to highlight one of the challenging issues with the new translator pedagogy: theory and practice within a university level translator training programme.

 

Some earlier reflections on teaching translation in Morocco (Higher education level)

http://www.proz.com/doc/3029

Fouad 

Reflections on my expereince as a teachers and research in translation pedagogy( and studies).

   In the MA course I facilitated between 2009-11 (Translation Studies and the real world), I tried to bring in the real life situation of the translation profession through creating my own innovative approach, resulting from my early readings on   translator pedagogy literature and else. The course was made for the first time and I had to choose, plan and deliver, assess the contents myself. I had a preliminary outline about my intervention, but I was lucky to find the students had just been back from their internship so I had asked the course administrator for their reports, and spent about half of the time during the first day discussing their internship experience. This discussion had helped me to reshape my course outline, and I presume that the more the teachers know about their students learning styles and needs the better they will be in a position to assess their teaching and improve it accordingly ( Viau et Bouchard, 2006, p1).

   Being a course about professional issues in practice, I resorted to use active pedagogies, workshops mixed with ICT tools. The focal point was to create simulations of the real world of translation, how language services are carried out in the real world or the virtual world (online freelance) and the constraints. I was trying to link between the course at hand and the profession ( Viau et Bouchard, 2006, p. 38). From time to time I present a brief lecture to students to guide them through some declarative knowledge they might need to help them apply it and reflect on it while dealing with Problem Situations or Case studies.

     Nevertheless, I must admit that I faced problems in trying to apply the active pedagogies as well as the ICT tools in the MA class due to:

·         -Students uneasiness with these types of activities, since they are still influenced by the old paradigm whereby knowledge is and should be transmitted from one fountain (the teachers) and that students should absorb that knowledge and compete with each other to be distinguished. The professor is judged on how bright she or he is in delivering the course content.

·        - I tried to incite them to bring in their lap tops or use internet at home to communicate with each others on online discussion groups and do research on special sites to get them used to the online environment since it takes a big chunk of their future work. Nevertheless, neither the university infrastructure nor students financial situation helped me to run this activity smoothly.

 Fouad

Importance of the course plan and outline.

When I was teaching   in higher education between 2008-11, I was not taking seriously the idea that designing and planning an efficient course outline as being a crucial factor to determine the success or not of the intended learning outcomes of the course I was facilitating. Content was king, then. What was stressed was topics/contents and teachers objectives. However, it turns out that what is really important is to target achieving learning outcomes, designing adequate learning  activities for those specific objectives or outcomes and then create assessment tools to assess whether learners had achieved those outcomes to a degree. The alignmnet between all these elements is very important, otherwise course learning objectives will be derailed.

Also, I doubt any of the teachers or faculty I was working with in the MA  or even the diploma course in translation did have the course plan well before starting their course, including the pedagogical approach, intended learning outcomes and assesment tools they design in a conscious and responsible way... and that's crippling the quality of learning and misguiding the learner or student...worse off, in translation teaching for instance, the lack of adequately designed instruction that reflects real world experiences, requirments and practices was lacking....It is very important to know why should I be using practicums in an MA course and what is the best way to engage students using activities that are similar to the ones used either in translation offices, bureaux or between online freelance translation agencies or online translation outsourcers.

In 2011, I took a graduate/development programme at Sherbrooke University (Canada) on teaching in Higher education. The course was very practical. It allowed me to reflect on how to approach better the content, the classroom, students characteritics and learning styles, the type of pedagogical approach to undertake ( or a mix of harmonious approaches) and apply them to translator training and education...Yes, education.

The good thing was that : I took this course  fully online, and this had pathed the way for me to specialise in my PhD ( a year later) on online education applied to translator training.  However, after two years in my PhD I changed the topic: pedagogical and curriculum practices in f2f2 translation programs. Yet, my exposure to online interactive education and scholarship taught me interesting new and key points in educational technologies in general, more specifically, those adapted to translator education and training contexts.

Fouad