المترجم المحترف مع د. عبدالله العازمي – The Professional Translator with Dr Abdullah Al-Azmi

An Arabic-language conversation with Dr Abdullah Al-Azmi on what it takes to be a professional translator.

Misconceptions About Translation Studies in Arab Universities

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

Why This Is Alarming

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 Nothing is more dangerous than procuring derailed knowledge and engaging students with worn-out, outdated, underdeveloped and one-dimensional concepts, processes and epistemologies of multilingual mediation and services.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

The Introductory Course Problem

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

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

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

The Missing Link: Translation-Specific Research Methods

Translation-specific research methods are the missing link in many translation departments in the Arab world and beyond. The reason is simple: research methods in translation studies are a recent arrival in academia, recent even in the best institutions hosting MA and doctoral degrees in translation.

In the Arab context, we need to integrate this knowledge now. Of course there will be the usual resistance from the gatekeepers of existing, non-discipline-specific methods borrowed from neighbouring fields: philology, linguistics, comparative literature, even applied linguistics. It is good practice for every translation studies department to take up this initiative and update its curriculum.

Correcting a Misconception

It is time to confront the misconceptions that many administrators and faculty hold about translation in general and translation studies in particular. I personally took a big risk by enrolling in a faculty of education in Canada to do my PhD in translator education and training. Why? Because only in the educational sciences could I get solid training in research methods and methodologies. I adapted what I learnt to translator education and translation studies, and I have never regretted it. I updated my knowledge, learnt new methods, and found a new way of approaching research in translation and interpreting studies, especially the applied branch of the discipline.

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.

The Myth of Teaching 'Any Course' in a University

Teaching, learning and performing in a university have become complex, yet many academics ignore how much training and development they need to close that gap. Every field, discipline and profession requires its educators to acquaint themselves with the scholarship of teaching and learning specific to that field, whether history, medicine, the sciences, translation or business studies.

The 'comfort zone' tactic

The administration's favourite tactic, shuffling faculty across courses to get them out of their so-called comfort zone, works against learning and against students. The learner ends up with second-hand teaching and a disoriented, superficial grasp of the discipline. Worse, instead of designing and managing quality learning environments, faculty fall back on a decontextualised textbook that students treat as a sacred resource, and which is then called the recommended 'syllabus' or 'declarative content'. This is exactly the practice of the secondary school.

Teaching in HE is a discipline of its own

With the growing interest in the quality of university teaching and learning (alongside research), a wide and innovative literature has emerged in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Some universities, in Canada for example, now run credit-based postdoctoral training programmes to prepare PhD graduates and future faculty to teach in their discipline with a quality-assured approach. Instinctive, impressionistic and fragmented approaches to university teaching yield weak learning and performance outcomes. The stakes are higher still in professionally oriented disciplines such as medicine, engineering, and translation and interpreting.

The textbook trap

Teaching exclusively from textbooks is a prime example of weak pedagogy. It produces flat learning and assessment of declarative knowledge alone, with no attention to skills or to the sustainable, lifelong abilities that subjects like translation and interpreting demand. Heavy reliance on textbooks also breeds a pharaonic attitude in which the instructor believes he can teach any course the administration allocates, as long as there is a textbook. Wrong. This is ill-planned on the administration's side, and on the faculty side it de-professionalises teaching and diminishes the instructor's status. Nobody can teach any content once the bible of a textbook is taken away.

To keep the status of university instructors alive and kicking, they need to reflect on their practice, engage in classroom research, and manage their learning and teaching environment according to the guidelines and frameworks of teacher education: andragogy for adult students, and university-specific pedagogies.

Teaching is a profession

The instructor is a professional whose job is to design a customised learning environment that maximises students' learning and performance opportunities, aligned with contextual curriculum and course-level guidelines. That means careful, strategic choices by the course designer and manager (the faculty member) to create and mobilise thriving learning environments for specific learning outcomes. Responsible, dynamic adult students, not passive empty containers, will flourish in a rich, diverse and stimulating environment built on active pedagogies: problem-based techniques, project-based learning scenarios, collaborative learning and the like.

Takeaway: fewer textbooks, more thriving, stimulating learning and performance environments.

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.

European Society for Translation Studies

European Society for Translation Studies: European Society for Translation Studies

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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.

Teaching " Introduction to translation"

We often stumble in most of undergraduate university programs in the Arab world (and elsewhere) upon mainstream and core courses such as the one entitled ' introduction to translation'. This course has been taught in the same way and with, more or less, the same contents for years. It is usually about teaching to students the practical issues in translation, including principles, techniques, strategies with minimum theoretical input (leaving this little gap for another course called 'theories of translation; or so and so...). Since, most students in this course - in the context of languages departments- can either end up majoring in linguistics, translation or literature ( or another track in other universities), it is suggested ( in the syllabus) that the main thing they should do is practice basic translation; i.e pedagogical type of translations. In terms of content or scholarship, we find the use of the usual suspects : textbooks of Mona Baker, Hatim, Munday and some others ( Ghazal...etc)...most of them standing for the linguistic ( functional or text linguistic paradigm in the discipline).....In addition to traditional references  such as beaugrande and Catford to teach basic elements and techniques as well.

If we would like to approach the course from another angle whereby updated scholarship, innovative pedagogy and insights from the profession could be added, we may find ourselves in front of another map of that same course that is called ' introduction to translation'. In my current argument here I will only stress the point that whatever level of the student enrolling in a course called ' introduction to translation' what we should do is not following the old tradition of teaching the course. The field has changed at various levels and new insights have been introduced in it. Even translation or interpreting practice have changed and still keep changing due to many factors such as technology and globalisation. In saying this, I take  into perspective the fact that no additional load should be allocated to faculty beyond his usual load, other wise the suggested endeavour to improve the course and its pedagogy will definitively fail. Teaching a course needs to go through a lengthy pedagogical engineering process whereby vibrant and stimulating learning and performance environments need to be created. Also, the instructor or faculty need to be closely acquainted with the universe of the course ( knowledge framework). 

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Translation has now become a matter of building and constructing sets of complex skills, knowledge and behaviors. So, introducing the student to translation needs to cater for the aforementioned elements instead of relying heavily/soleley on specific sets of textbooks to disseminate a narrow set of information and knowledge. The course ‘ introduction to translation’ should be about:

- Introducing the students to the universe of translation (theory and practice) via real examples using print, multimedia or oral/narrative/journal mediums.

- Educating the student and develop in him / her the 'self-concept' since he or she is studying a discipline that is presented by a professional body in society. That includes the teaching of KEY HISTORICAL elements preferably via the use of multimedia resources to EDUCATE the future translator to be and welcome him to his or her new community ( of learners and then of professionals)

- Introducing him or her on the critical issues and ongoing practices in TRANSLATING texts ...various genres. It is advised that students should do this in groups, although it is a challenging task. Still, faculty with exceptional and updated pedagogical 'know how' and 'know what' could do it.

Well! The question here is how to do it? The answer is : you need to know how to integrate both traditional and new scholarship into the course as well as have the pedagogical skills and abilities to do so ( to engineer your course and set significant learning performance environments).

So, introduction to translation should not be about teaching students how to translate following an exclusively linguistic conceptualization of translation dating back from the seventies and eighties (including early nineties), but it should embrace the new concept of translation: competence. Hence, how can we educate, train and teach at the same time new entrants in the discipline? A course on translation should be more hybrid and diverse to allow students to have a broad idea about the field of translation as theory/academic field as well as practice ( profession). Faculty needs to use his or her pedagogical and disciplinary ( updated) knowledge to engineer that very important course. No point adding other courses such as techniques, strategies of translation or even theories of translation.

We presume that teacher knowledge and beliefs about the field and the practice is crucial . The usual thing we witness in a university context is that faculty uses his or her subjective perception of what should be included in the course 'Introduction to Translation' instead of relying on updated scholarship, established practices and innovative or adapted pedagogical skills and insights to develop the course.

Fouad

NB: At the pedagogical level, the course can be taught in a diversified way ( Mixed method of teaching, Anderson, 2000). For instance, one can use the classroom lecturing for discussion and then place the lecture on specific concepts and elements that  students need to know and appropriate about the translation phenomena and concept in year 1. Faculty can have recourse to deposit selected contents, multimedia files and their own recorded lectures or explanations on either Blackboard or Moodle to allow students to either prepare or post-check and refer to the material afterwards to enhance learning.  Or deposit the lecture and its activities 3 days before the day of the lecture, let students have time to revise and read or listen to the deposited file, and when in class it will be discussion and explanation to deepen learning. The use of mind mapping techniques in the classroom is very useful. It allows students to visualize the information ( theoretical) and make sense of it.....and RETAIN IT.

 THE BELOW VIDEO COULD BE INCLUDED AS 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 و النور في الشرق في عشر دقائق

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