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?

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.

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.

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.

Professional Acumen: The Missing Piece in the Instructor Profile

In a professionally oriented college or university programme, one element of the instructor's profile is decisive: professional knowing and doing, together with a sense of belonging to a disciplinary area, whether hybrid or single. The golden rule is that the teacher, trainer or instructor succeeds in transferring the knowing and doing of the profession to the students, including the corresponding professional identity, or what the education literature calls self-concept. Students cannot make sense of new knowledge and practice on their own; they have not yet been exposed to the professional environment, unless through an internship or occasional access.

The misalignment

Many programmes in academia now claim to produce future practitioners and professionals. That claim creates a misalignment between the human resources actually available and the outcomes the programme promises, because instructors with the right profile are lacking. The victims are the student and, in the long term, the institution's image and brand. Quality control and supervision of instructor profiles and competencies is therefore necessary to guarantee a decent level of education and to assure parents and society of the seriousness and relevance of the institution's mission. In public universities this remains a distant goal, at least in most institutions. In the private higher education sector it can be reached to a certain level, and parents want clear pedagogical and professional mechanisms in place so that their investment makes sense and is fairly rewarded.

The human factor

The Achilles' heel lies in the human factor (faculty, instructor, student, parents), not in the object (content, courses, assessments). Investing in the people who intervene in educational contexts, and setting criteria for them to practise the profession, even in the private sector, is a fundamental requirement for quality in education. You cannot provide "transitional solutions" that ruin the face value of the institution, even temporarily. It is risky, and it diminishes the institution's standing. Bringing in an academic, or "someone on the team", to do a task they are not qualified for can affect students negatively, reduce their motivation to learn, and change their perception of the entire department or institution.

These reflections apply directly to translation and interpreting programmes, especially those oriented towards professional and market competencies, without sidelining the academic component that underpins practical, transferable skills and abilities.

Research, Training and Practice: The Russian Dolls Allegory

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

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

The ideal profile

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Translation Studies Workshop at the British Institute in Amman

A recording from a translation studies workshop held at the British Institute in Amman, Jordan – a rare glimpse of translator training conversations happening in the region itself.

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.

The 'I Can Teach Any Translation Course' Syndrome in the Arab Context

In my years teaching translation across departments in the Arab world (Oman, Qatar, Morocco and Saudi Arabia), I keep meeting colleagues from neighbouring disciplines (literature, linguistics, TEFL) who volunteer, or willingly choose, to teach a translation course, or even a course in translation studies. Elsewhere, in Canada for instance, this practice does not exist. It would never happen unless the instructor could show solid evidence of a translation background.

Practising translation is not enough. There must be an epistemological commitment as well, and an up-to-date one. Translation studies is an interdiscipline that keeps gaining pace and weight. Clinging to early approaches, philosophies and conceptions of translation does nothing for the student's learning curve. Yet in the Arab context a great many faculty are still shaped by their original disciplinary orientation (literary studies, linguistics, applied linguistics, TEFL). Some have embraced their new discipline; others still operate within translation and translation studies through the lens of comparative linguistics, literature or even EFL. The result is a misinformed student population who pass those insights on to society, in workplaces and classrooms, with negative consequences for an emerging discipline in both theory and practice. Society's perception matters.

When the syndrome made sense, and why it no longer does

In the early days of translation teaching (the 1950s in Europe and Canada, the 1980s or 1990s in many Arab countries), the syndrome was defensible. The textbooks in use could be understood and taught by instructors from neighbouring disciplines in lecture-based theory courses, and practical courses followed the traditional, teacher-centred apprenticeship model, with ad hoc or read and translate methods. So long as translation teaching and content were closely tied to linguistics and literary studies, "I can teach any course in translation" applied. It has not applied for a couple of decades.

Translation programmes in the Arab world need to revise their practices and approaches to match the interdisciplinary nature of translation. And instead of teaching from a textbook, we need to make the extra effort (workload permitting) to diversify our pedagogies and methods, finding innovative resources and techniques that raise students' motivation and learning. These statements are not intuitive: I have spent the last ten years studying this phenomenon, which produced a PhD and three peer-reviewed articles, two published and one in progress.

Three requirements

Translation studies has taken new shapes and generated concepts foreign to neighbouring disciplines. It began with the linguistic turn of the 1950s and 1960s, then moved through the communicative, cultural, textual, sociological and pedagogical turns to today's technological turn (Austermühl, 2004, 2010; O'Hagan, 2019). Three things follow.

• Only specialists should teach translation. Translation is a professional practice as well as an academic discipline and should be treated like other professions in academia, whether the course is theoretical or practical. (A foreign-language department that uses translation only to improve language competence is a different case.) Expertise should be demonstrated: publications, in-house and freelance work, participation in translation conferences, professional membership, and so on.
• Some instructors and administrators need to reconfigure their view of the multilingual domain through professional development and further training in the knowledge frameworks of recent approaches and schools in translation. The profession changes, and so does academia. Why cling to the old teaching models still found in many undergraduate and postgraduate translation programmes in the Arab context, as my recent doctoral thesis showed (El-Karnichi, 2017)?
• Teaching and learning in translation classrooms should draw on mainstream education studies, adapted to adults and higher education.

Takeaway: the syndrome underestimates and downgrades both the translation profession and the discipline. Teaching is not a simple textbook delivery operation; it is an entire pedagogical design operation that integrates cognitive constructs, situational contexts, real-world realities, codes of ethics and reference frameworks. Translation programmes need faculty development activities, and I suspect this is the case in many higher education contexts.

Interdisciplinarity in Translation Studies

A recorded lecture from the University of Geneva on interdisciplinarity – a theme that runs through everything we do in translation studies, which borrows from linguistics, education, cognitive science and beyond.

Corpus Research in Translation Studies, Continued

The second part of a University of Geneva lecture on corpus research – the continuation of the session shared in the previous post.

Watch on the University of Geneva media server