Addressing Certain Grey Areas in the Students' Translation Feedbacks

Abstract

Students' feedback is an essential part of improving competence and performance of students' own translation abilities. This feedback provides real information for teachers and trainers to consider in their teaching professional development. However, in the field of translation, as for several other disciplines, knowledge, practice, and even curricula should be influenced by student feedback, and in turn, students' competence, performance and expectations can be directly affected by what they are actually exposed to in the classrooms. This study tries to penetrate deep through the formative feedback to arrive at the main influential factors behind the difficulties that students face in translation. The study explores certain gaps between some aspects of course content and the actual needs of students as translators. It also investigates the factors behind the difficulties that students face in translation. These factors can be summarized as follows: (1) the subject matter of most courses is irrelevant; (2) the actual needs of student translators are not always addressed; (3) gaps exist among the three components of the curriculum – language skills, linguistic skills and translation skills, and (4) the absence of translation training or practice outside the college in real situations. The study tries to clarify the identified problems and suggest some solutions to address these gaps in order to help students develop into professional translators. The study suggests the need for a radical change in the subject matter of language skills courses and the whole curricula.