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.

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.