Teaching translation in a multilingual practice class

Anthony Pym | Universitat Rovira i Virgili | The University of Melbourne

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.

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

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