Process-oriented translator training

This paper presents partial results of a multiple-case study of English to Polish translation students who enrolled in a three-semester undergraduate translation course in western Poland. The author analyses the students’ web searching skills before and after a 4-month intervention. The research question the author addresses is whether and how the increased expert searching skills developed by the students influence their search speed and accuracy. In a broader context, this paper constitutes a part of a research project that examines the development of information competence in undergraduate translation students.

This article describes briefly the Hofstede model of six dimensions of national cultures: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity / Femininity, Long / Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint. It shows the conceptual and research efforts that preceded it and led up to it, and once it had become a paradigm for comparing cultures, research efforts that followed and built on it. The article stresses that dimensions depend on the level of aggregation; it describes the six entirely different dimensions found in the Hofstede et al. (2010) research into organizational cultures. It warns against confusion with value differences at the individual level. It concludes with a look ahead in what the study of dimensions of national cultures and the position of countries on them may still bring.

Translation studies academic field has evolved in recent years and the urgent need for qualified translators/ interpreters is increasing day by day thanks to globalization. However, the research on the pedagogical
side of translator education is still at development stage. Being a namely brand new academic and industrial research area, translation technologies have recently been in the center of translation
world. The present study puts forward the factors which affect the use of translation technologies in translator education from a pedagogical point of view and offers adaptable solutions for the academics
working in a variety of academic translation teaching departments. Accordingly, the current research aims at facilitating as a bridge between the science of pedagogy and translation studies.

Key Words: Translation studies, psychology of learning, pedagogy, translation technologies, translator education

Lying at the intersection of translatology, cognitive science and linguistics, this book provides a comprehensive framework for studying, investigating and teaching English-Russian/Russian-English non-literary translation. It provides a holistic perspective on the process of non-literary translation, illustrating each of its steps with carefully analyzed real-life examples. Readers will learn how to choose and process multidimensional attention units in original texts by activating different types of knowledge, as well as how to effectively devise target-language matches for them using various translation techniques. It is rounded out with handy and feasible recommendations on the structure and content of an undergraduate course in translation. The abundance of examples makes it suitable not only for use in the classroom, but also for independent study.

During the last few years, Translators and interpreters’ (TI) employability has been studied, especially when the education reform of the Bologna Process and European Higher Education Area (EHEA) seems to challenge universities to better respond to the professional prospects of graduates; guiding them towards a certain profession or field of professional performance. Many studies have addressed these issues, though with some critics in terms of representativeness of their conclusions (Calvo 2006). Nevertheless, it is true that a new educational paradigm was introduced in University education. However, this changing paradigm seems not to have reached yet other spheres, for instance, the labour market, as this paper will present.
The present piece of work will encourage the labour market to better adapt to this change, taking as a starting point, and focusing on translators, interpreters and international communication experts, the recruitment policy of candidates for the internationalization grant scheme of the Spanish ICEX (Instituto de Comercio Exterior, Foreign Trade Institute). Finally, this paper aims at contributing to the reflection on the TI professional profile, looking for a greater consolidation of the profession into the labour market.

With increasing arguments and evidence suggesting its benefits, First Language (L1) use (including translation exercise) is experiencing a resurrection in Second Language or Foreign Language (SL/FL) classrooms. One form of L1 use is composing comparable and parallel texts, which can be an important pedagogical resource but which has received limited attention in SL/FL classroom research, both pedagogically and empirically. Based on theoretical justifications and an in-depth discussion of possible benefits of comparable and parallel text analysis, this paper reports on the design of a comparable and parallel text analysis course to enhance beginning trainee translators’ linguistic competence and on their reactions to the pedagogical design and its effectiveness. Data were collected from 19 trainee translators at the participating university through course experience questionnaires and retrospective then-now self-assessment questionnaires. The results suggest that the pedagogical design was well received by the trainees and effectively helped them achieve the course objectives.

... tante porque rompe en cierto modo con la concepción tra-dicional de la enseñanza. ... cuatrimestre del curso 2008-2009, se ha llevado a cabo una experiencia de colaboración más planifi-cada y más integrada que la anterior, entre dos asignaturas obligatorias de ...

Research on mediating cross-cultural differences in rhetorical conventions of research article abstracts (RAAs) between such
culturally distant languages as English and Chinese is rare. This article aims to explore the differences in rhetorical preferences between
independently produced English and Chinese research article abstracts and the strategies used in translating Chinese RAAs into English.
RAAs published in three journals between 2006 and 2016 were selected to form three corpora: corpus A consisting of 32 English RAAs,
corpus B made up of 38 Chinese RAAs, and corpus C including 38 English RAAs which are translations of the RAAs in corpus B. Corpus
A and B form a comparable corpus while corpus B and C constitute a parallel corpus. Results suggest that Chinese and English RAAs
have different preferences in rhetorical move patterns because the rhetorical moves of Product and Method are much more frequent in
English RAAs compared with their Chinese counterparts, and that rhetorical foreignization is the dominant strategy in translating Chinese
RAAs into English. Possible reasons of such rhetorical differences and the impact of this resistant strategy on the reception of the
translated RAAs in the international community is discussed.

This paper investigates the extent to which translator training influences the perceptions of translation and shapes the role of the translator. The study explores the cohorts' perceptions of translation and of the role of the translator drawing from Tymoczko's call (2014) to look beyond Western conceptualisations of translation. A view that long benefited from the view of translation as an act of transfer or carrying across. Recent research suggested viewing translation as an act of re-contextualisation (House, 2018) or an act of re-narration (Baker, 2014). The study uses think-aloud protocols (TAPs) to monitor and understand the process of translation. Two groups of participants were selected for this research. One group comprises of ten trainee translators, who are MA Translation Studies students, and the second comprises of ten natural translators, who are bilinguals with no prior training in Translation. The natural participants perceived translation as a process of transfer in which the translator plays an active role. Trainee translators viewed translation as a communicative process, and the translator is at the heart of this process, creating links between cultures and increasing intercultural knowledge.

This book addresses the question whether translation students can successfully increase their information competence as a result of a purposeful intervention. As translation technologies have become a staple in the translation industry, the ability to interact with the Web to solve translation problems is now a basic market requirement. Although there is a growing body of empirical research into web search behaviors of translators and the use of web-based resources in translation, none of the studies aimed at incorporating information competence strategy training into a translation course. The study described in this volume aims to fill this gap. The book will be of interest to translator educators as well as to professional translators who want to improve their web search expertise.

As translation research moves towards investigating translation processes and not just products, researchers have begun to examine the effects of those processes on the quality of target texts. Translation products result from the interaction between expectations of what translations should be and those practices and competences by which translators produce acceptable translations within temporal and economic constraints. Translation process models suggest what cognitive decision processes might involve, and competence models outline the expert knowledge and cognitive components assumed necessary for effective translation work. In translator training, translation processes have traditionally been accessed and evaluated through student annotations and other written commentaries. Recently, however, other ways of including explicit input on the translation process have been proposed, including the transfer of process research techniques to understanding and evaluating undergraduate stu...

In recent years, the influence of information and communication technology (ICT) has transformed the professional practice of translation and, consequently, led to the introduction of new techniques, methods, and media in the university teaching environment. The new technology has made professional translators’ work easier but, in order to ensure translation studies graduates meet employers’ needs, ICT must occupy its rightful place in their training. The ever-demanding market expects would-be professionals to be able to access the subject matter of any text, use a wide range of computer tools proficiently, and be versatile enough to master all aspects of the translation process. Today, the market place for translation can justly be described as global, decentralized, specialized, dynamic, virtual, and demanding (Aulaint, 2005).

The background to this course is given in Englund Dimitrova (2000). It is aimed mainly at students who wish to translate from another source language than those included in the previous curriculum, or to translate into another target language than Swedish. The curriculum is designed to make it possible to admit students with different language combinations to the same course and train them in the same group.

The course runs over one year of full time study, and includes 8 modules of 5 ”points”; at the time, one ”point” was assumed to correspond to one week of full time study (one week comprising study work with contact hours plus self-study = 40 hours).  The first semester includes the modules Professional knowledge, Swedish text analysis and Swedish text production, Translation theory, and Translation I. The second semester includes compulsory modules LSP and terminology and Translation II, and further 2 modules of free choice; in the academic year 2001/2002, students could choose between Literary translation, IT related translation, and Media translation.

In the course, there is a very close link between the modules Swedish text analysis and Swedish text production and Translation I. Students first learn about different genres and text types in Swedish, focusing at a different text type each time. Then, those with Swedish as their target language apply this knowledge in translating, from their chosen source language, a text from that text type. Students with Swedish as their source language instead translate the analyzed text into their chosen target language. All students also write commentaries to their translated texts and their translation process, focusing on different aspects in different tasks.  The sequencing of the tasks in Translation I follows three different tracks or principles simultaneously: text type based, translation process based, and based on linguistic translation problems.

When the course was offered for the first time, it attracted a large number of applicants. The evaluations showed that the degree of overall satisfaction was quite high.

The official curriculum (Swe. Kursplan) is included after the text of the paper.


Addition, written in 2019: the principles underlying this model and described here are still to a large extent the backbone of the translation programs at Stockholm University.