Beyond the Silo: Why the Future of Translation Is a Pedagogical Challenge

For a long time I felt I was balancing two professional identities. I was a scholar of translation studies, immersed in the nuances of cross-lingual communication; and my doctoral work was rooted firmly in education, in how we structure learning, design curricula and foster critical thinking in professional contexts such as translation. I used to think I had to keep these worlds apart. I was wrong.

In the age of AI, the biggest hurdle for our industry is not technology adoption. It is pedagogy.

The Educational Crisis in Translation

When we talk about the 'talent drain' in translation, we are not just talking about software. We are talking about an educational crisis. We have been teaching translation as a manual, linear skill. To thrive in the AI era, students need to become researchers, auditors and meta-cognitive architects of their own workflows.

This is where my background in education has become my most valuable tool. Doctoral training did not just teach me to manage a classroom; it taught me to dismantle old concepts and build new, effective mental models.

The Hybrid Identity

As a translation pedagogy practitioner and specialist, I have realised that the 'language intelligence architect' we need today is fundamentally an educated learner. To be a great translator today, you must be a great student of your own process. That is why I am pivoting my professional identity toward translation pedagogy design.

• It is not just a translation course. It is an educational experience that uses the Augmented Iterative approach to teach students how to think through problems with an LLM.
• It is not just proofreading. It is a pedagogical assessment design, the Audit Trail, that requires students to justify their cognitive choices against the AI's suggestions.
• It is not just theory. It uses the deep epistemological foundations of translation studies as a diagnostic tool to critique machine output.

If we do not bring our deep knowledge of pedagogy into our translation studies classrooms, we will keep producing graduates who are technically proficient but critically empty.

Are you seeing this merge in your own work? Has your training in one field, such as education, unexpectedly become the 'killer app' for your success in translation?

Beyond Mock Exams: Audio Briefings for the AI Era

Mock exams are not a tenable method of assessment in the age of AI and digitalisation. As an educator in multilingual education and AI-assisted pedagogy, I am challenging the memorisation paradigm that has dominated our classrooms for too long. Mock exams belong to a different era, rooted in the standardisation and industrial paradigm that treated education like assembly-line production. Here is why I reject them, and what I do instead.

Why mock exams fail

Mock exams promote rote cramming and turn students into prisoners of repetition. They kill cognitive dynamism and ignore how multilingual skills, such as contextual fluency and cultural adaptation, demand real-world application rather than one-shot tests from an outdated industrial model.

My approach: progressive mastery, in class and remotely

I favour continuous activities and mini-projects that build competencies situationally. Students apply their multilingual skills through collaborative tasks, simulations and AI-enhanced workflows, developing a deep, layered understanding along the way.

The innovation: NotebookLM audio guides

Today I used NotebookLM to create an audio overview of the final exam structure: an elaborate narrative linking each question to the full network of lectures. Students engage multisensorially, listening, associating content (the module on multilingual practices and ethics, for example) and reflecting. This immersive preparation boosts retention without a single mock exam.

In the AI era of multilingual education, tools like these augment cognition, reduce anxiety and spark motivation. Yet existing structures and policies, especially those plagued by micro-management and control-mania, do not let such illuminating methods be nurtured and implemented.

Responsible AI Use: Translation Students Apply GenAI with Critical Oversight

Teach students to use generative AI with human oversight, and they will do exactly that, even when you are not looking. A set of meeting minutes recently proved the point.

A forum across two universities

I recently organised an online forum bringing together my former students from the MA in Translation Technologies at the Saudi Electronic University and my current Level 3 BA translation students at Sohar University. The objective was to build a community of learners, establish a network and encourage the exchange of practices across universities and countries.

After the meeting, I asked the moderator of the Omani group to prepare minutes documenting the experience. The format of the document, evidently processed with a GenAI tool, struck me. In my classes I have been gradually integrating the careful use of generative AI and AI tools with my Level 3 students, always stressing the need for human oversight of any output.

How the students did it

The students I am teaching in Audiovisual Translation this semester applied that principle to the minutes, which I found gratifying. When I asked how they had produced the four-page document, one student explained:

To prepare this document, I began with the video recordings, which totalled over an hour and a half. I transcribed them into text using Evernote. I then divided the text into smaller sections and used ChatGPT to extract the main ideas from each segment. After compiling all the key points into a Word document, I meticulously reviewed everything to ensure accuracy, and I found that most of what ChatGPT provided aligned with the actual discussions from the meetings.

Translanguaging Pedagogy: The Way Ahead for English Instruction in MENA

Enough is enough. Across the MENA region, a large share of students still struggle to reach proficiency in foreign languages, above all in writing, speaking and listening. The difficulty extends to tasks such as translation and post-editing, and it has become more visible with the recent surge in large language models.

The video below explains the essential role of translanguaging in both monolingual and multilingual education, and shows its relevance, inclusivity and capacity to empower and motivate learners. It is time to move beyond post-colonial prescriptions about effective foreign language learning, whatever accent is favoured. This applies not only to the GCC and North Africa, but potentially to every region that has lived under French or English colonial rule.

Watch: translanguaging in monolingual and multilingual education

Teaching Outside Your Expertise Is Not Teaching

As educators, our primary objective is to provide impactful learning experiences that reflect our areas of expertise. Assigning faculty to teach subjects outside their specialisation undermines that objective and jeopardises the quality of education.

Teaching is more than delivery

Teaching transcends content delivery. It involves interpreting the subject matter and helping students navigate its intricate concepts. Assigning courses to people who lack in-depth knowledge of the subject is not only pedagogically unsound but unprofessional, and it harms students and faculty alike. Universities must prioritise aligning courses with faculty expertise if they want genuine learning environments.

The economics behind it

We understand the economics of education. But too often these practices are pushed through by stubborn administrators to save money, while the official narrative of student-centred learning, teacher well-being and rising motivation carries on regardless. How can we expect engagement and integration when we do not respect, or seriously consider, the faculty profile?

Once again, K-12 practices are being transferred blindly, perhaps purposefully, into higher education: a teacher of English can also teach history, geography, humanities, social sciences or mathematics, whether in Year 5, 7 or 11. That, unfortunately, is the mindset we are in.

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.

Rethinking Assessment in the Age of AI

Rethinking assessment in the age of AI is now essential for anyone in higher education or K-12. Assignments and homework, in particular, need re-evaluating.

From Product to Authentic Assessment

Product-based assessment should be reshaped through more authentic methods: case studies, peer-to-peer discussion in class, mind mapping, oral presentations, recorded videos and podcasts. We should also set critical thinking assignments in which the thinking is presented visibly and publicly, for instance in peer-to-peer interaction.

In courses centred on writing, essays, translation or commentary, assessment should be combined with other authentic activities, typically by pairing oral or visual artefacts with traditional techniques. Another innovative approach is to assess the process a student goes through to produce the work. A record of the prompts they used, for example, lets educators see the intellectual investment and reasoning behind the final submission.

What It Will Take

Implementing these changes demands significant pedagogical and philosophical shifts across the education sector, in K-12 and higher education alike. That may mean teaching assistants or tutors to maintain a workable student-to-teacher ratio, or reduced teaching loads so that faculty have the time to create authentic, high-quality learning environments.

The need for political will inside institutions is evident when we consider the realities of higher education today, especially in regions such as the GCC. Faculty development opportunities must be established, and class sizes and faculty workloads reconsidered to fit the new assessment methods, including training in innovative teaching strategies and smaller classes to strengthen engagement and learning outcomes. Adopting a new educational philosophy is imperative if these goals are to be met.

A Peer Conversation on Competency-Based Teaching

Today I had a very interesting peer-to-peer session with my colleagues in the department, and I was pleased with their interest and reactions. We discussed the relevance of Gibbs's pedagogical approach to university teaching: teaching to enable students' competencies rather than delivering educational experiences that force them to memorise. In other words, teaching so that students understand and perform at the same time.

The core question was whether our educational context allows us to facilitate competency-based pedagogies, which are designed to enrich students' experience and prepare them not only for work but for a sustainable lifelong venture.

The teacher's engineering ability, designing and developing thriving learning environments, seems to be the most demanding criterion in this enterprise. Integrating the experiential model into instruction is another hurdle to clear. Continuous professional development can help instructors lead a competency-based approach to teaching and learning.

All in all, leadership and management support is essential to activate this approach. Without reducing the useless administrative burden and twisted bureaucracy that so often inhibit educational success, at student, faculty and institutional level alike, it will be difficult to implement this important part of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

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.

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.

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.

What Should a Teacher Know? Beyond the PhD

A PhD or an MA in a discipline does not, by itself, make anyone a competent teacher. Teacher knowledge and competencies deserve to be discussed, explored and investigated, and nothing should be taken for granted.

The COVID experience added a whole new set of knowledge and skills to the inventory that instructors and future teachers, at every level, need to appreciate and be trained in. This holds in any discipline, and it makes professional development a certainty rather than an option. Research matters enormously in higher education, but pedagogical and instructional ability matters too, especially in professionally oriented disciplines and vocational training. Neither lecturing nor repetitive, experiential learning alone will fill the gap. We need a cluster of knowledge, skills and abilities.

Shulman (1986–1992) pointed to the importance of pedagogical and content knowledge, a key variable to align with when designing and developing courses. With the significant development of instructional technologies, a further paradigm emerged that adds the technology and pedagogy components to Shulman's framework: what Sharma (2009–2012) referred to as the TPCK (Technological, Pedagogical, Content Knowledge) framework, which teachers, instructors and faculty need to align with and implement, whether in K-12 or higher education. It is a more comprehensive and efficient approach: integrated, yet comprehensive and sustainable.

I will explore this theme, in general education and in its application to translation, interpreting, multilingual studies and EFL, in my upcoming podcasts.

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.

COVID-19 and the Global Education Emergency: Planning for Recovery

A talk on how education systems can plan for recovery after the COVID-19 emergency – worth a look for anyone rethinking programme delivery after the pandemic.

Yes, Online Translator Education Works

Some still say the online model in education does not hold. This year I had the chance to prove otherwise.

I developed, created digital content for, and taught two of the most sought-after courses in translation technologies, plus one course in advanced interpreting, fully online, for an MA programme at one of the best e-universities in the Gulf region, in partnership with Colorado State University.

I lived the experience from scratch, from programme pre-approval to where we are now: our second semester, with two more to go before the first cohort graduates. The content is highly innovative, some of it new to the region. So far the programme has been a success, and many more students are lined up to register next year. Promising.

New content, new mode

In the Arab region, and especially the Gulf, translation departments are not used to hosting courses such as localisation, online interpreting, fully fledged e-courses in translation technologies, revision or project management. These are top-tier innovations in graduate translation curricula. For such courses, students log into Blackboard Collaborate (the chosen LMS) every week, attend a live and interactive lecture, and then complete varied assessments of their understanding.

Diversified assessment is the key element that makes the difference, and it is why the synchronous online model deserves credit. Believe me, learning, teaching and transformation are taking place. Triangulating assessment tools; student-content, student-instructor, student-student and instructor-content interaction online; and delivering assessment to strict deadlines are clear signs of educational practice that creates impact.

So why the doubt?

Why should these learning and teaching experiences not be considered viable? On what basis? Perhaps an ideological, self-serving and narrow interpretation of what e-learning means. With COVID upon us, it cannot be denied that a well-designed online exercise or test should count. Institutional support should also be offered so that instructors can develop abilities and pedagogies specific to online environments.

One last question: what are we assessing, content or understanding? It is time to move beyond assessing the product (content) and focus on assessing the level of understanding, deep or surface (Bart, 1995).

Teacher Reflection in Action

A video on reflection-in-action: how a teacher reads and responds to learners and the whole classroom environment while teaching, not just afterwards.

Watch on YouTube

Covid-19 Has Exposed Our Neglect of Formative Assessment

Formative assessment has been badly used and purposefully ignored by education institutions. The video linked below explains why it matters; here is my view on why it has been sidelined.

Why Institutions Avoid It

Perhaps because it is tough on instructors: it needs hard work and a long commitment to continuous feedback, which can be torture for teachers with large classes. For administrators and educational managers, it is not cost-effective, because it forces them to limit class sizes, even as they boast about student-centred approaches. The contradiction is plain: how can an instructor give full commitment to a hundred students through active pedagogies and, by extension, formative assessment? It is time for higher education bodies to rethink their assessment tools and methods and humanise the educational experience for the next generation.

What Needs to Change

The hype and fear surrounding "common exams", "mid-terms" and "finals" needs to stop. Instead, we need to train and recruit responsible, well-rounded faculty with sound ethical and professional stamina. A PhD in some content area will never be a fair or sufficient standard on its own. Genuine professional, pedagogical and curriculum know-what and know-how are key. Only those with pedagogical know-how and a real feel for professional practice can design innovative, practical and well-monitored assessment tools.

Higher education policy must change too:

• reduce class sizes;
• rethink recruitment standards;
• discard the whimsical, amateurish and self-serving political considerations that creep into recruitment;
• treat faculty as professionals, not as puppets or mere transmitters of textbook content who can teach "whatever course" and handle "whatever class size".

Here is the link: Assessing Student Learning Online (Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals)

Dictionaries in Translation Exams: Why the Debate Is Misplaced

Many foreign language and English departments in the Arab context, though not translation departments or schools, still treat the use of dictionaries in classroom translation tests as a hot topic. In contexts with a long tradition of teaching translation, the topic does not exist, even where translation is a minor (see the minor programme in translation practice at McGill University, Canada). They went through this and binned it decades ago.

It Is All About Perception

The debate boils down to how our colleagues in neighbouring disciplines, especially EFL, perceive translation as an academic activity and as a practice. The argument survives as long as students see translation as a tool for improving their foreign language proficiency. The worst case is when these colleagues insist in committees that exams be run without dictionaries, as if a translation test were an exercise in text comprehension or vocabulary. Not quite. Translation must be conceived as a profession and a practice. A practitioner needs tools to work and think, and so does the translator, who needs them to solve linguistic, cultural, communicative and ethical problems on the way to rendering a text in another language.

Assess the Process, Not Just the Word

Dictionary use itself, monolingual or bilingual, deserves scrutiny. Do students use the tool efficiently? Do they finish on time? Information mining, searching, speed and efficiency are skills that belong in assessment; they are key professional and lifelong abilities. Marking a student on whether they found the correct meaning of a word is not a sufficient standard of performance. We are measuring the process as well as the product: the use of a tool to choose the appropriate term and solve the problem, and the understanding of a text not for its own sake, as in language learning, but in order to transform and use it for communicative and social purposes.

Choosing the text is the other critical step, and it belongs to the faculty member teaching the course. The instructor needs to select strategic material containing the patterns and structures students must reformulate to demonstrate their mastery of the mechanics of translation and transfer. Whether they used the correct word comes second. Here is where the real problem lies: can you choose texts with the variables that measure the targeted skills, knowledge and abilities? Let us not hide behind the curtain of banning dictionaries. If the material is chosen strategically, dictionaries will not harm the outcome we are after: communicating and reformulating structures and ideas fluently, idiomatically, contextually and ingeniously. The vocabulary-matching game comes second.

Translators Communicate Information, Not Words

The aim is to see whether students can transfer and transform structures at the textual and generic levels to produce healthy, communicative, pragmatic texts with a smooth flow of information. Translators communicate structured information primarily, not just words or correct vocabulary. Much of the traditional translation studies literature ignored the term 'information', deliberately or not, preferring 'source versus target text' or 'transfer of meaning', in other words anything explicable with concepts from linguistics, language studies, or comparative literature and rhetoric. And often students do not find adequate equivalents in the dictionary anyway, so they fall back on context, audience, purpose and other variables.

A Thin Line, and a Teachable Habit

Making translation students sit tests without a dictionary is untenable. We need to draw a thin line between learning a language and being able to translate. Students sometimes produce bad translations even with dictionaries. The trick they are taught is: first do the terminology and glossary, then start reformulating the text. Yet they apply the method they use in language learning, looking up the words in each sentence and translating that sentence at the same time, which leads to literal translations and strict adherence to source-text structure. This can be remedied in the classroom through effective, engaged instruction, monitoring and mentoring by the trainer.

Finally, think of an engineer, architect or mechanic. When they spot an anomaly in their material, the equivalent of a difficult word in a text, what do they do? They use materials and tools. The same applies to the language service provider, translator or interpreter.

After graduating, I sat translation tests at many local, regional and international organisations. I always took a bag of paper-based glossaries and all sorts of dictionaries into the exam. So did every other candidate. Full stop. Outside the EFL universe, it is normal practice.

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.