Arab University Translation Program and Labor Market Requirements

Abstract

Introduction In the foreign language acquisition research field, there has been a frequently long-standing debate about the effective relationship between learning process input and the learners’ output; what is prescribed for students and what is needed by them. Several debates were frequently made about skills that should be acquired by translation students, content that should be selected to be taught, pedagogical objectives that should be taken into consideration, teaching methods that should be used, and finally learning outcome that should be reached and achieved. There's no denying that new research methods as well as novel trends in linguistic studies and methods of teaching have contributed towards developing approaches of dealing with translation programs within universities. However, the direct or indirect impact of such developments on meeting labor markets’ requirements need to be discussed academically. Without a shadow of doubt translation is the key to achieve global communication between communities and countries from different cultures and languages. It is a necessary means for creating interaction and mutual understanding between peoples all over the world. It has been an ancient job practiced by different people from different spots even before the establishment of universities or academic institutions. Due to the frequently increasing need to translate in all fields including political, religious, media, social, literary, legal, and so on, translation programs have been established within Arab universities to provide well-qualified translators in all fields of life. The amount of materials need to be translated daily has increased tremendously due to the spread of globalization, constant advancement of science, new inventions, and innovation. With the course of time, educational institutions were set up with the target of preparing well educated graduates in all fields including translation, which has traditionally had a secondary position since it was dealt with just as a language teaching tool, especially in Grammar Translation Method. However, it wasconsidered as a specific discipline just fifty years ago; yet, the very start of it was only linguistics as it was affected by scholars such as Catford (1965) and Vinary and Darbelent (1958). Tymoczko (2007) stated that as soon as the Second World War finished, translation was established as an academic discipline in specific translation schools and institutes and,later on, it was incorporated in academia where it was not only offered as a linguistic transfer process but also as a communicative act and a professional activity (Peverati, 2009). In the late forties training of translators started inside European institutions due to post-war political, diplomatic and economic reasons. During 1950s and 1960s, translation turned into a field of study that included two main divisions: applied and pure or theoretical and descriptive (Holmes, 1972). Caminade and Pym (1998) roughly calculated the number of university programs provided for translation and interpretation around the world to exceed six hundred, which highlights the extremely large increase since the 1990s. Neverthless warning bells started to ring as the outcome regarding translation graduates was not as expected. There was a frequent debate about the objectives of teaching translation inside universities; are they linguistic or vocational ones? For the common good, translation programs at universities should combine both, as proficiency of language is not enough to create a professional translator. In addition, there is a growing need for providing learners with sound understanding of different cultures and facts all over the world; since a good translator should not only be bilingual, but rather should be bicultural as well. Considering that the demands of the translation labor market and the mechanisms of translation work have changed rapidly, translation programs have become under increasing pressure to be adaptable to the requirements and expectations of the rapidly-evolving profession (Al-Batineh and Bilali, 2017).