Teaching Simultaneous Interpreting Fully Online

Last semester I taught the advanced simultaneous interpreting course to my MA students at SEU fully online. It is now delivered in a hybrid format, but the online run proved something: conference interpreting can be taught, and done, remotely.

I used the interpreting environment on Zoom (a paid feature) to teach the course. Students appreciated the experience of interpreting remotely, and it made sense to them that simultaneous and conference interpreting could be done this way. Zoom's conference interpreting facility was the right solution at the time. It met the training requirements and objectives, replaced the interpreting lab, and gave us no technical problems during the sessions.

I designed and developed this graduate course, which comprises 14 modules, 7 critical thinking assignments, 6 discussion points, and a mid-term and final exam. I am glad to have been involved in its design, development and implementation.

Post-Covid Curriculum: Competency Models, Not Textbook Models

Reviewing or developing programmes in higher education usually follows a highly bureaucratic, product-based pathway: documents, checking, more checking, more documents. Or else benchmarking, which too often means looking at what others did and copying it with slight modifications. That is not curriculum development.

The work institutions avoid

Real pedagogical and curricular engineering means collecting, documenting and saturating relevant data. It is not a pathway that higher education institutions, especially in the public sector, like to take. The same shortcut is followed in accreditation.

What competency-based review is not

There are many models for evaluating and modelling curricula, but the most suitable for the post-Covid context is the one that takes competency as its framework. What we privilege in curriculum evaluation or review is not:

• shifting or renaming course titles and content;
• modifying the outcomes or objectives on paper;
• the religious choice of a specific textbook as the condition for the programme to breathe and develop.

Reshuffle the process

Instead, in our view, the first thing to do is to reverse the order of work:

1. Document and identify the practices of the disciplines at stake in the local context, especially where a corresponding professional practice exists in the local economy and society.
2. Select and classify those practices to develop standards of practice. This information comes from data gathered through interviews, focus groups and surveys.
3. Sit down as a team and align disciplinary knowledge with what was collected from the profession, or from the real-life context of the discipline or content taught.
4. Select and categorise.
5. Only then build the content, activities, pedagogies, training modes and assessment methods, aligned with the newly engineered curriculum.

I hope this clarifies the point.

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.

Improvement Science and Higher Education Pedagogy

In 2021 I approached the Faculty of Education at Western University about enrolling for a second PhD. At first the idea seemed crazy and unreasonable. Yet I wanted to take on the challenge, against all odds, and what made me want to go further was the new area of inquiry my prospective supervisor suggested: improvement science in education.

The missing link

This emerging field aligned closely with the orientation of my first PhD, on curriculum and pedagogical practices in higher education. I felt I had found the missing link. Improvement, per se, of pedagogical and curriculum practices in higher education in Qatar, and subsequently in other contexts in the region, was exactly what my earlier doctoral work had been about.

A few months later, sadly, heavy family responsibilities and pressures forced me to put the adventure on hold. I am now considering either resuming that path or engaging in a self-directed study of the field, with a view to publishing on curriculum and pedagogy improvement.

Why improvement matters now

What troubles me about improvement in higher education is the persistence of traditional, standardised pedagogical and curricular patterns. With Covid, things seem to be moving in the right direction: new post-Covid modes of instruction, assessment and intervention are a case in point. Teaching and learning environments are changing, so this is the moment to improve curriculum and pedagogical practice and to lead inquiries into it. Teachers, faculty, administrators and trainers need a new mindset. We might even move beyond the boundaries of pedagogy and start applying the concept of andragogy: how adults learn in professional and self-directed contexts.

In my own case, advocating a competency-based approach to curriculum development and design is itself an appeal to rethink curriculum practice. I doubt mainstream public universities will buy into it for the moment, but the private college and university sector would surely be keen to explore it, as would universities that favour experiential and field-, profession- or market-related forms of training and learning.

Improvement should start in basic education and move up the ladder to higher education. It is not just a tool or a practice, but a philosophy and a vision to be adopted and believed in.

Does Competency-Based Education Spell the End of the Textbook Empire?

I have worked in four universities in the Gulf, and in three of them I lived through the renewal of existing programmes or the approval of new ones. One traditional habit appeared every time, especially in EFL and translation programmes, and even in education courses themselves: the rush to recommend textbooks, as if the entire knowledge frame lived in one or two books. I never once heard an institution use the word "competency" or "competence".

Why Competency Models Are Rare

Perhaps the competency model does not sit well with traditional publicly funded universities. They follow a curriculum paradigm that has run for over 150 years, inherited from primary and secondary schooling, and it usually leads to graduate unemployment and stagnation.

Competency models demand hard work, pedagogical engineering skills and ongoing updating. They prepare students for real, authentic, lifelong abilities. They are more dynamic and more rewarding for the twenty-first-century generation. They stress the link between society, the economy and the educational institution, and they require teachers and faculty to design learning and performance environments tailored to specific student needs, market demands and national priorities. It is a different world, and a more challenging one. Without genuine pedagogical know-how, faculty will struggle to engage with a competency model.

In EFL, authentic, customised, context- and work-oriented learning and performance environments, enhanced with experiential and project-based pedagogies, seem to be the way ahead.

Takeaway

Research is needed to revamp our curriculum practices and create meaningful learning and performance activities for our students. Linking with the world of practice through research and development is a key requirement in this endeavour.

What Should a Teacher Know? Beyond the PhD

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

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

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

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

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.

Can Experiential Learning Work in the Liberal Arts?

A few years ago I worked at a university in the Middle East whose English department was going through accreditation. From what I heard, the university or the accreditors demanded that the literature and linguistics units demonstrate how experiential learning could be applied in their courses. Faculty in the liberal arts faced a real challenge.

An intruding paradigm

Experiential learning usually lives in the sciences and in professionally oriented programmes such as engineering and medicine. Bringing this 'intruding' paradigm into the unfamiliar terrain of the liberal arts was not easy. Courses that could not integrate an experiential dimension were prone to extinction, and possibly to the closure of the unit itself, whether literature, poetry or drama.

I had a broad idea of how experiential learning could be applied in translation, interpreting, business studies, engineering and medicine. Beyond my own experience in applied languages, I had worked alongside peers in my doctoral research lab who were studying those very disciplines. In educational development, that is how it works: we bring the tools and techniques, then collaborate with subject-specific experts to get the job done.

Learning beyond the fixed room

In a classroom or lecture theatre, the context is confined to a fixed space and a limited time. Beyond it, learning can come from a visit to a heritage site or museum, from immersion in a good book, or from the workplace itself. My colleagues teaching drama, poetry and literature were bewildered about how to build experiential learning into their courses, since what the university wanted was proof of the economic and social relevance of the programme.

So I made some enquiries internationally, and found a professor at a Canadian university who had published three articles on this innovative model of teaching.

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

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

Using PLR Articles To Make Videos For Affiliate Marketing

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.