The IATISContinuum Translation Studies Series

Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates

Edited by John Kearns

IATIS Yearbook 2007

John Kearns (ed.) (2008) Translator and Interpreter Training; Issues, Methods and Debates. London/New York: Continuum.

ISBN (hardback): 0826498051

ISBN (paperback): 082649806X

As a research area, education in the fields of translation and interpreting has received growing attention in recent years, with the increasing professionalization of the language-mediation sector demanding ever more highly trained employees with broader repertoires. This trend is evidenced in the present collection, which addresses issues in pedagogy in a variety of translation and interpreting domains. A global range of contributors discuss teaching, evaluation, professionalization and competence as they apply to an array of educational and linguistic situations. Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates presents an in-depth consideration of the issues involved in this area of translation and interpreting studies, and will be of interest to all students and academics working and researching in the field. Scroll down for full Table of Contents.

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< Frontmatter

< Contents

< Contributors

< Introduction

John KEARNS (Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland)

1. Professionalization and Intervention

Candace SEGUINOT (York University, Toronto, Canada)

This paper examines factors that have determined what professionalism means to the kinds of intervention that take place in communicative processes. The last fifty years have seen translation studies focus on translation or interpretation as an object, then as a process, and now in terms of the subject. Subject here has at least two senses: the translator or interpreter as agent, reflecting ideology through choice, and the subject as an individual, whose working life is affected by the translating or interpreting situation, institutional aspects of the profession, and material constraints such as technology. Whereas translation and interpreting courses in universities over the last three decades have helped to promote professionalization, our understanding of what it means to be a professional has changed. Where there has been a change in framing issues with the theoretical shift from a text-typological to a functional perspective and a resulting congruence with the aims of the marketplace, the latest marketplace definition of 'professional' has come to mean proficiency in technology for translators and standardized behaviour for interpreters. The issue of the position of the translator and interpreter, as subject in the second sense, remains to be examined.

2. Teaching Interpreting and Interpreting Teaching: A Conference Interpreter’s Overview of Second Language Acquisition

Alessandro ZANNIRATO (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA)

This paper examines links between thought about conference interpreter training and research into Second Language Acquisition (SLA), with a view to encouraging debate between the two disciplines. The author also provides a practical demonstration of how SLA research can help with error analysis and correction in trainee interpreters. Few empirical studies have attempted to investigate whether L2 learning focussed on syntactic and lexical accuracy can occur through interpreter training, though the author’s own research shows that such training may be better at improving semantic proficiency and speaking skills than in addressing syntactic performance. Thus error correction supported by grammar explanation in interpreter training is potentially useful and a framework, informed by SLA, is proposed with the aim of ameliorating acquisition of finely-tuned grammatical structures in trainee conference interpreters.

3. Training Editors in Universities: Considerations, Challenges and Strategies

Haidee KRUGER (North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, South Africa)

This paper argues that university disciplines such as translation and interpreting may offer useful contexts and models for the training of text editors. Staff decentralisation and outsourcing, economic limitations and technological changes now render in-house editor training insufficient and impractical, thus offering universities new opportunities in this field. Following Ian Montagnes, the author proposes that such editor training programmes can and should be full academic courses, based in the humanities and social sciences, and in business and industry. They should be anchored in practice, but with sufficient attention to theory for learners to be able to reflect critically on the practice of text editing and on the decision-making processes that it involves. An outline of such a programme is proposed along with a process-oriented training model, based on Daniel Gile’s proposals for the training of translators. The process-oriented approach may be particularly useful in attuning learners to the often covert decision-making processes involved in text editing. Consideration is also given to practical matters such as assessment strategies and the advantages and disadvantages of using professionals or academics to deliver such a course.

4. Mobility Programmes as a Learning Experience for Translation Students: Development and Assessment of Specific Translation and Transferable Generic Competences in Study Abroad Contexts

Dorothy KELLY (University of Granada, Spain)

This paper sits within an “educating for society” paradigm, in which undergraduate and postgraduate translation programmes at university are understood to fulfil more than a purely vocational purpose. It is within this context that student mobility programmes are first analyzed with a view to describing the benefits mobile and non-mobile students obtain from them, drawing on data compiled in a major research project into student and staff perceptions of mobility programmes. The paper proceeds to question the traditional academic procedures used for the recognition of study-abroad periods in some contexts. As an alternative approach to the issue, mobility programmes will be taken to contribute per se to the development of both specific translation and transferable generic competences. An attempt is made to define the learning outcomes to be expected from mobility programmes on translation courses, and a proposal is suggested for assessment of the degree to which these outcomes are achieved.

5. Systematic Assessment of Translator Competence: In Search of Achilles’ Heel

Catherine WAY (University of Granada, Spain)

In this paper the author presents her own system of student translation assessment called Achilles Heel. Within the context of life-long learning and personal and professional development, this system encourages students to evaluate their own work critically and to analyse their translator competence systematically. Students are asked to assess their work during the academic year by noting down their own strengths and weaknesses in a structured framework as they progress. By using real examples classes discuss the changes that translator competence may undergo throughout translators’ professional lives (loss of A/B language competence due to lack of direct contact, improvements in thematic competence due to professional experience and greater familiarity with a given field, etc.). They debate the strategies that may be used in the most typical examples, thereby encouraging verbalisation and analysis of the reasons underlying weaknesses or errors which become apparent in their work. To date, students have learnt to detect where they tend to commit (repeated) errors. When evaluating their corrected work and in preparation prior to exam periods, this can prevent reoccurrence of errors or help them to repeat successful strategies. Provisional results are encouraging, especially amongst weaker students.

6. First Results of a Translation Competence Experiment: ‘Knowledge of Translation’ and ‘Efficacy of the Translation Process’

PACTE Group (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Allison BEEBY, Mónica FERNÁNDEZ, Olivia FOX, Amparo HURTADO ALBIR, Inna KOZLOVA, Anna KUZNIK, Willy NEUNZIG, Patrícia RODRÍGUEZ, Lupe ROMERO
Principal Researcher: Amparo HURTADO ALBIR

This paper builds on previous investigations into translation competence by the PACTE group and presents the design of an experiment developed for the validation of the PACTE translation competence model. Also presented are the initial results from this experiment of two of the dependent variables tested – ‘Knowledge of translation’ and ‘Efficacy of the translation process in A-B translation’ – in which the performances of translators and translator trainers were contrasted. Regarding ‘Knowledge of translation’ the groups tested were found to have a coherent concept of what it means to mediate between two cultures, though teachers tended towards a literal, linguistic concept of translation while translators leaned more towards a functional concept. Regarding efficacy of the translation process in A-B translation, results suggest that “translators compensate for their lack of practice in the foreign language by activating a more strategic subcompetence and so achieving a higher level of acceptability than the teachers” (118).

7. SLIP – A Tool of the Trade Married to an Educational Space: Making British Sign Language Dictionaries

Christine W. L. WILSON and Rita McDADE (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland)

Heriot-Watt University has been developing a digital resource designed to assist training in sign-language interpreting in specialist settings in both practical ways (providing access to real-world information) and by providing a space for personal development. This tool comprises a virtual interpreting classroom supported by certain reference facilities: monolingual English language and British Sign Language (BSL) dictionaries (terminology in specialist fields), a bilingual dictionary function linking terms in the two languages, and specialist background information. The virtual environment offers access to authentic source material as well as model interpretations for reference, and enables the capture of students’ versions (in BSL). It was essential to develop a means of searching for and retrieving signs without recourse to another spoken/written language. This paper outlines the project as a whole, focussing on the development of the BSL dictionaries, their design and the approach adopted to obtain the linguistic data and to evaluate terms for inclusion. Important issues included the role and place of language “created” by or around interpreters along with questions relating to the “responsibility” of such a project: how to balance the requirements of a market lacking reference resources against the need for more research as linguistic issues are encountered.

8. Fan Translation Networks: An Accidental Translator Training Environment?

Minako O'HAGAN (Dublin City University, Ireland)

This paper addresses the issue of fan translation, a phenomenon which has gained particular momentum among enthusiasts of Japanese manga and anime in Internet-based scanlation (i.e. scanning, translation, editing and distribution of manga from Japanese) and fan-subbing (i.e. fan subtitling) communities. Focussing in particular on scanlation, the author presents a detailed account of the scanlation process and then discusses a pilot experiment conducted in order to compare the manga translation skills of a fan scanlator and a professional translator. This small-scale study revealed a significant degree of sophistication in the work of the scanlator, demonstrating that fan translation is far from being a clueless amateur activity. As such, it is proposed that the ways in which fan translators acquire their skills might well usefully inform hitherto institutionally-based translator training research.

9. The Academic and the Vocational in Translator Education

John KEARNS (Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland)

This paper examines the academic / vocational dichotomy inherent in translator training – a typically vocational activity often based in (and in other ways contingent upon) academic settings. The author contrasts the historical foundations and development of academia and the separate tradition of apprenticeship and vocational training, with a view to understanding the predicament of the contemporary university wherein translator training is one of many areas straddling both traditions. This examination brings to light both biases against academia among the professional translation community, and a questioning of the skills transferability potential for academic translator training with reference to the contemporary labour market. Taking the classical Bobbitt/Dewey opposition between training students for jobs and preparing them for life, the author argues that excessive front-end loading vocationalization has the potential to work against the interests of both universities and translation graduates.

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