Teaching translation in a multilingual practice class

Anthony Pym

Understood as a course of instruction that aims to improve translation practice in a space where the instructor does not master all the languages, the multilingual practice class may save money for training institutions but can present serious challenges to instructors, especially with respect to the assessment of translation quality. Solutions to these challenges can be found in a few pedagogical principles: it is enough to set up task-based discovery activities to focus on cognitive processes and their interaction with technologies, privileging questions to which there are no consensual answers and using peer assessment for evaluating product quality. This approach effectively brings research techniques into the teaching space. It might thus meet resistance in institutional contexts where master-apprentice models traditionally attribute authority to the instructor’s experience, rather than to the learners’ discoveries.

Article outline

Introduction
General guidelines
- Focus on processes, not products
- Work on things we don’t know
- Encourage experimentation
- Form a multilingual community
Pedagogical principles
- The class is task-based, as far as possible
- Students work in twos and threes
- Use screen recording (and other cheap technologies)
- Translation quality can be peer-assessed with rough numbers
- Process quality can be assessed quantitatively and qualitatively
- Theoretical principles and research results are to be discovered, not given
Curricular content
- Introduction to translator styles
- Translation-memory segmentation
- Directionality
- Pre-editing vs. post-editing
- Translator-client negotiations
Results
Conclusions
Note
References

Published online: 18 June 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ata.xix.15pym

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