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Abstract
This paper reviews entrepreneurial activities that take place within the simulated translation bureaus of member institutions of the INSTB network and establishes a link between entrepreneurism, self-efficacy and perceived competence. Reusing pre-test and post-test data of a student survey, a first attempt is made to design and test a survey instrument for gauging the impact of a simulated translation bureau on perceived entrepreneurial competence and self-efficacy for planning, setting up, and managing a translating organisation in pedagogical translation company simulations. Tentative results suggest a positive effect of participation in translation company simulation modules on students’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy and perceived competence. Because of the anonymity of the data, pre-test and post-test responses could not be paired. As a consequence, the statistical significance of the results could not be confirmed.
Highlights
In recent decades, a good many authors have argued that a narrow, textual focus on translation tasks does not sufficiently prepare translation students for the job market as it may allow trainees to harbour the illusion that professional translation involves little more than textual conversion
This paper reviewed entrepreneurial competences for their relevance to translation students and described a set of pedagogical practices designed to develop them in translation company simulations
As the business aspects of translation are coming to the fore in translator training, translation students will benefit if translator education curricula are expanded to include the development of entrepreneurial competence and self-efficacy
Summary
A good many authors have argued that a narrow, textual focus on translation tasks does not sufficiently prepare translation students for the job market as it may allow trainees to harbour the illusion that professional translation involves little more than textual conversion. The EMT Competence Framework lists several business-related tasks in the categories of Personal and Interpersonal competence and Service Provision competence. It will enhance the graduates’ prospects even further if translation pedagogy looks at the translator’s skill set from the point of view of entrepreneurship, supplementing the translation-related competences with some skills required for setting up, running, and developing a translating organisation. In the context of entrepreneurship, it may prove to be useful to conceptualize translation students’ awareness of their abilities as self-efficacy, sometimes characterized as a “can-do attitude” (De Noble et al 1999), a concept that brings together aspects of competence and self-confidence (see, for example, Bolaños-Medina/Núñez 2018). To develop a broad set of translation-related competences, various didactic concepts have been proposed to mirror the diversity of professional practices more accurately than traditional prac-
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