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

Corpus Research in Translation Studies

A University of Geneva lecture on corpus research and what corpora can do for translators and translation researchers.

Research Methodologies in Translation and Interpreting Studies

My recent training in research methodologies for translation and interpreting studies at the Université de Genève's Faculty of Translation and Interpreting was an outstanding experience. It let me cross-check and update my knowledge of the field, and it has set me planning a course on translation and interpreting research methodologies for undergraduates and graduates at my university. Next year, I hope.

It is time to regulate the wholesale transfer of research patterns from neighbouring disciplines such as linguistics, applied linguistics and literature. Faculty who teach research methods should update their approaches, no easy task in the humanities, and adopt a discipline-specific paradigm. Aligning with international standards is crucial, even, and especially, in emerging contexts for translation and interpreting studies.

Which Translation Theory Should We Teach? Let Students Choose

What should the theoretical side of translation teaching focus on: theories, models, approaches, perspectives, or all of them? Should we balance our instruction across theoretical schools so that students can choose the hub they wish to belong to, or stress one aspect and let students appropriate it?

A balanced survey, not a favourite school

According to González (2005), rather than privileging one theoretical school or approach in translation studies, the translator educator should survey the existing and emerging approaches in a balanced way and let each student choose the approach he or she wishes to adopt or appropriate. In this regard she criticised Hatim's heavy focus on text typology as the model for translation research.

I think this is a sound, student-focused approach rather than a teacher-focused one. What do you think?

Master's students and undergraduates

This matters most for Master's students about to undertake their research projects. For undergraduates, it is good to trace and discuss the historical development of translation theory and its core concepts, especially at the level of method (strategies, techniques). One option is to survey the concepts set out by Catford (1964), Nida (1960s), Newmark (1988) and Jakobson (1959), then, at the end of the semester, briefly cover developments in the newer field of translation studies.

This is a student-centred approach to sharing knowledge. We all have our preferences and biases, but let us keep them for our research. In the classroom, let us think about the student profile and the student's needs.

EST Journal Rankings for Translation Studies

The European Society for Translation Studies keeps a ranked list of translation studies journals – essential reading before you decide where to submit your next paper.

EST journal rankings

Tessa Woodward: Is There Still a Role for Translation in Language Teaching?

In this interview clip, Tessa Woodward asks whether translation still has a place in the language classroom – a question that keeps resurfacing in translator education too.

Guy Cook on Translation

Guy Cook makes the case for bringing translation back into language teaching – worth watching alongside the Tessa Woodward interview.

Rethinking the 'Introduction to Translation' Course

Almost every undergraduate programme in the Arab world, and elsewhere, has a core course called 'Introduction to Translation'. It has been taught the same way, with more or less the same content, for years. It is time to build it differently.

The Course as It Stands

The course usually teaches students the practical side of translation: principles, techniques and strategies, with minimal theory, which is left to another course called 'Theories of Translation' or similar. Since most students in a language department may end up majoring in linguistics, translation or literature, the syllabus suggests that the main thing they should do is practise basic, pedagogical translation. In terms of scholarship, we find the usual suspects: the textbooks of Mona Baker, Hatim, Munday and a few others such as Ghazala, most of them representing the linguistic (functional or text-linguistic) paradigm, plus traditional references such as de Beaugrande and Catford for basic elements and techniques.

If we approach the course from another angle, adding updated scholarship, innovative pedagogy and insights from the profession, we find ourselves in front of a very different map of the same course. Whatever the level of the student enrolling, we should not follow the old tradition. The field has changed at every level. Translation and interpreting practice have changed too, and keep changing, under the pressure of technology and globalisation.

I say this knowing that no extra load can be added to faculty beyond their usual teaching; otherwise any attempt to improve the course and its pedagogy will fail. Teaching a course properly requires a lengthy pedagogical engineering process that creates vibrant, stimulating learning and performance environments, and the instructor must be closely acquainted with the knowledge framework of the course.

What the Course Should Be About

Translation has become a matter of building complex sets of skills, knowledge and behaviours. Introducing students to translation must cater for all of these, rather than relying on a narrow set of textbooks to disseminate a narrow set of information. The course should be about:

• Introducing the universe of translation, theory and practice, through real examples in print, multimedia, oral, narrative and journal media.
• Developing the student's self-concept, since they are studying a discipline represented by a professional body in society. That includes teaching key historical elements, preferably through multimedia resources, to educate the future translator and welcome them into their new community: first of learners, then of professionals.
• Raising the critical issues and current practices in translating texts of various genres. Students should ideally do this in groups. It is a challenging task, but faculty with up-to-date pedagogical know-how and know-what can do it.

How? You need to know how to integrate both traditional and new scholarship into the course, and you need the pedagogical skills to engineer it and set up significant learning and performance environments.

From Linguistic Transfer to Competence

'Introduction to Translation' should not teach students to translate according to an exclusively linguistic conceptualisation of translation dating from the seventies, eighties and early nineties. It should embrace the newer concept of translation: competence. How, then, can we educate, train and teach new entrants to the discipline at the same time? The course should be hybrid and diverse, giving students a broad picture of translation as an academic field and as a profession. Faculty need to use their pedagogical and updated disciplinary knowledge to engineer this crucial course. There is no point adding further courses on techniques, strategies or even theories of translation.

Teacher knowledge and beliefs about the field and the practice are crucial. What we usually witness in universities is faculty relying on a subjective perception of what belongs in 'Introduction to Translation', rather than on updated scholarship, established practices, and innovative or adapted pedagogical insight.

A Note on Delivery

Pedagogically, the course can be taught in a diversified, mixed-method way (Anderson, 2000). In year one, for instance, classroom time can be used for discussion and for lectures on the specific concepts students need to grasp and appropriate about translation as a phenomenon. Faculty can deposit selected content, multimedia files and their own recorded lectures or explanations on Blackboard or Moodle so students can prepare beforehand or refer back afterwards. Or deposit the lecture and its activities three days ahead, give students time to read or listen, and use class time for discussion and explanation that deepens learning. Mind-mapping in the classroom is also very useful: it helps students visualise theoretical information, make sense of it, and retain it.

The video below could be included as course material: https://twitter.com/AbdulrahmanTR/status/914028750857281537

Translator Education and Training in a University Context : Pedagogy, Practice and Research: Highlights on pedagogical concerns in translation ...

Translator Education and Training in a University Context : Pedagogy, Practice and Research: Highlights on pedagogical concerns in translation ...: In this communication, I would like to share with you some reflections on a series of recent interviews I had with potential employees (... Please post your comments.

The Big Picture View on the Translation Industry

A big-picture overview of the translation industry – useful context for students who need to see the market they are training for.

عصور الظلام في أوروبا والنور في الشرق في عشر دقائق – Europe's Dark Ages and the Light of the East in Ten Minutes

A ten-minute Arabic video on the period when Europe was in its Dark Ages and the East was a centre of learning – a reminder of the translation movement that carried that knowledge across languages.

Dark Ages, Time for Light – عصور الظلام أزمنة للنور

A companion piece to the previous video: the same period, the same story of knowledge moving East to West through scholarship and translation.

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.

Setting Up as a Freelance Translator

A practical talk on setting up as a freelance translator – the kind of career guidance our graduates rarely get inside the curriculum.

واقع الترجمة في المملكة وخطوات تصحيحه – The State of Translation in Saudi Arabia and How to Fix It

Dr Khalid Mohammed Al-Sagheer, writing in Al-Jazirah, takes stock of translation in Saudi Arabia and proposes concrete steps to put it right.

واقع الترجمة في المملكة وخطوات تصحيحه – د. خالد محمد الصغيّر

Untitled Video Share

A video I shared without a title – I would encourage readers to have a look.