INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCES IN TRANSLATION EDUCATION: A COLLABORATIVE TASK-BASED APPROACH

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to report on the collaborative task-based case study that was organized bilaterally between the students at the University of Novi Sad and the University of Zadar, as a part of two translation courses, at the undergraduate and graduate level of studies. This study is part of some bigger research and the study presented in this paper has the following aims: to help the students gain intercultural competences by working collaboratively both in teams at the home university and online together with the students from the other country, using different virtual collaborative tools, and to face the challenge of organizing the translation project related to a specific task. Intercultural competences and the ability to cooperate are among the core competences that are required from a professional translator; however, these competences are not sufficiently covered by the learning objectives of curricula and syllabi at the university level. For that reason we wanted to focus on these competences to try to increase our students’ employability prospects. The study was qualitative and quantitative, based on process and product analysis. We used observation, questionnaires and analysis of the final product of translation to collect the data for the study. The results point to benefits of this approach as well as to the areas that are in need of improvement in this field.