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)

Tools and Resources for Translation and Terminology

A short, practical list: how to build a term base in Memsource, plus a handful of dictionaries and resources I point students to for translation, terminology and interpreting.

Building Terminology with Memsource

1. How to download the Memsource app to your mobile device: https://help.memsource.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004017132
2. How to create a term base and add or import terminology files (video inside the article): https://help.memsource.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001725111-Lesson-3-How-to-Create-and-Use-Term-Bases

Resources for Translation, Terminology and Interpreting

• Lexicool: Arabic dictionaries and translation resources
• Glosbe multilingual dictionary
• Microsoft Language Portal terminology search

Tips for Freelance Translators

• Thoughts on Translation

Acronyms

• Acronym Finder

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.

Curriculum Development Needs Evidence, Not Intuition

Authors with long experience of teaching translation and interpreting in the Arab world (Atari, 2012; Farghal, 2009; Taibi, 2016; Mehrash, 2003) have warned of a wide gap not only in curriculum design but in its development and implementation in translation and interpreting programmes.

In our review of literature and practice in the region, we found that curriculum work in many translation units and departments at Arab universities is carried out exclusively by committees whose core scholarship is rarely in translation studies, and who rarely possess the pedagogical know-how and know-what of their discipline-specific didactics. Arguing about moving, adding or deleting courses is an old pattern of curriculum development. In discussions with colleagues, you will notice how little reference is made to:

• what the scholarship of training, learning and teaching in a university context says;
• what the scholarship on translation and interpreting pedagogy says, including findings from recent studies on similar issues in other countries;
• what the profession or market needs (surveys, interviews, focus groups);
• student profiles and needs (surveys, focus groups, interviews);
• employer needs (surveys, focus groups, interviews);
• what translation pedagogy says about curriculum practice at every level of development, design and implementation across countries and cultures, and on what principles and criteria to base decisions about the how and the what in the classroom.

Our dear colleagues argue from inherited experience, intuition and ad hoc criteria. No frameworks, no evidence. Things need to change. Curriculum reviews must be taken seriously, and colleagues need proper training in the scholarship of teaching and learning, including curriculum theory and practice, so that their reasoning rests on evidence.

Curriculum practice in higher education can be divided into three models (see Calvo, 2011): the theoretical and academic model, which our universities have followed for more than 90 years; the professional model; and the eclectic model, which is what a university should adopt, with more weight on the professional side in postgraduate programmes.

Takeaway: when discussing curriculum, refer to the scholarly literature as well as to departmental and personal needs. Both matter.

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.

Translating a Dialect Video Script: Raja Meziane's 'Allo le Système'

This English-subtitled freestyle by Raja Meziane is a good test case for the challenges of translating dialect in a video script or caption – rhythm, register and slang all have to survive the move.

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.

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.

The Standardised Exam Syndrome: A University Practice to Rethink

Standardised, collective exams have no place in a university. They are a secondary-school habit that many higher education institutions in the Arab world still cling to, and they undermine learning, faculty and the mission of the university itself.

A borrowed practice

Research in the educational sciences shows that standardised, collective examinations at university are borrowed from assessment and curricular practices at secondary level. European universities used them until the late 1970s. Yet many university administrators across departments in the Arab world still import the testing practices of secondary schools, preparatory years and language centres into a university context. Because of the 'mass' or multiple-section syndrome, administration prefers to run exams collectively.

This practice is didactically and pedagogically unsound, even etymologically, and it leads to poor learning outcomes. Micro-learning is far preferable at this level of education. It leads to completion of the learning task, because students can follow the stream of thought around a concept, whether in literature or any other declarative knowledge, in the techniques and patterns of a translation, or in the application of concepts in applied or theoretical linguistics. When other instructors are brought in to standardise the exam, students cannot produce the same quality of outcome, because the close continuum of thought and reasoning is broken. Final exams are a different story.

Three disciplines, one exam

Take the English departments of the Arab region, or an entire faculty of languages. Each is inhabited by three mutually unintelligible disciplines, linguistics, translation and literature, plus, of course, the language institute or centre. Despite this, administration runs the exam the same way for all of them. Can you set questions in drama, research methods, technical or general translation, or interpreting techniques the same way you assess language or preparatory-year students? The knowledge frameworks, pedagogies and practices (professional practices in the case of translation and interpreting) are simply not the same. So why apply one model of assessment, usually the product of an industrial, factory-line model, to every class?

Students on a production line

Students are treated like a production line. They are placed in lanes and rows. We are not looking at their learning; we are waiting for them to reach the end of the line and hand in their paper, not to demonstrate their learning and performance in different ways, but to submit what they memorised by heart. The mere thought of the mass exam hall frightens a student into devouring the content, or not. It is not one hour that reveals the real student and the evidence of learning, but a series of formative and summative assessments over the entire semester. The mid-term, and even the final, should not always be unified. It depends on many variables, starting with the nature of the discipline.

Assessment is discipline-specific

What is lacking is knowledge and skill in designing university assessment. At university, assessment is discipline-specific. Translation and interpreting have a professional vocation, so assessment should target skills, knowledge, behaviour and values, not merely textbook content. We cannot evaluate students only on what is in their textbooks and then administer standard exams that annihilate whatever remains of their learning experience.

Education needs proper investment: the recruitment of competent faculty with pedagogical knowledge of their discipline (and, where possible, of the profession) who can take on the burden of designing sound assessment methods that lead to lasting, lifelong outcomes. Certainly not the mass, line and lane model.

Faculty colleagues need to do this work, at least for the first and second mid-terms and perhaps the final as well in translation and interpreting. If we claim that student translators will operate confidently in the profession upon graduation, then we must prepare activities, content and assessment methods that improve students' performance in knowledge, skills, behaviour and values. The standardised exam is not that kind of assessment, I am afraid.

Good practice versus poor practice

In good practice worldwide, especially in higher education, the hot topics are discipline-specific pedagogies, didactics and assessment methods. We cannot mix everything in one pot; these areas of knowledge are fundamentally different. In poor practice, as in some universities in the Arab context, we still believe that to teach at university, in an English department or elsewhere, all we need is:

• Textbook X
• Lecture up to chapters x, y and z, then run mid-term 1, mid-term 2 and the finals en masse, with coordinators collecting questions from faculty
• Call in the army of invigilators to police the 'villain' students
• Call every academic an 'instructor' during exam time, diminishing their status and professional standing, as if they were chess pieces to be moved wherever and whenever administration pleases. Full, associate and assistant professors are rushed out to do four or five invigilations in a miserable, stressful, unhealthy, unethical and non-pedagogical environment. There are universities where this happens.

What this does

Approaching exams in this way leads to two outcomes:

• It kills the mission of the university. Such assessment works against student success and against the lifelong, durable, social and interpersonal skills that the university's own mission statement and outcomes proclaim. Institutional inconsistency is unacceptable.
• It demeans faculty. Academics are reduced to 'guides', 'servants', teachers of textbooks and exam markers, the same model used in primary and secondary curricula. Administrators forget that faculty, especially those trained at good international institutions, gained academic freedom and the ability to produce knowledge through long doctoral training. Those powers are scrapped once unhealthy administrative and assessment practices are imposed unscrupulously. Faculty barely manage a decent empirical article a year under such conditions. They become mere textbook teachers, there to make life easier for administrators who prefer the factory, army and counter model of evaluation inherited from early twentieth-century curriculum practices in secondary, or perhaps primary, schools.

Takeaway: assessment at university must be designed by the discipline, for the discipline. The standardised mass exam is a relic, and it costs us students, faculty and the mission we claim to serve.

كتب في علم الترجمة – Books on Translation Studies (Translators' Archive)

A curated archive of books on translation studies, in Arabic – a handy reading list for students and colleagues working in Arabic.

كتب في علم الترجمة – أرشيف المترجمين

Translating Europe Forum 2017: Booklet

The booklet from the European Commission's Translating Europe Forum 2017 – a useful snapshot of what the profession and the training institutions in Europe were discussing that year.

Download the booklet (PDF)

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.