Rationales for Cooperative Tasks in Taiwan Translation Learning

Abstract

In recent years, English teaching and learning have been getting considerable attention in Taiwan. Universities and colleges have been asked by the Ministry of Education to encourage language-majored students to take translation-related courses in order to raise the level of student’s translation competence. To meet this need, since 2003, the Ministry of Education has included English Translation I and English Translation II as core courses and provided official syllabi and guidelines for language departments and teachers. However, the features in the official syllabi seem to be missing parts in Taiwan translation instruction. A number of studies have found that many translation teachers still utilize traditional translation teaching methods. In a traditional classroom, the instruction is more teacher-centered, so students tend to rely only on the teacher’s suggestions and believe in teachers’ “perfect’ or ‘correct’ translation. With the increasing importance of translation learning, and the need for a cooperative and interactive teaching method suggested by the MOE, it is necessary to develop an alternative teaching approach for translation teachers. Therefore, the researcher intends to design a cooperative translation task which meets translation teachers’ and students’ needs. This study is a preliminary study working on the rationales for designing a cooperative translation task. This study addressed the following research questions: (1) What rationales should be included in this cooperative translation task? (2) How can rationales be realized in the design of the cooperative translation task? Based on the literature reviews, three main rationales will be used for the design of a cooperative translation task for Taiwanese college translation learners. The first prototype of the task, the Cooperative Translation Task (CoTT), will be provided in the current study.