Abstract
The authors deal with one of the key issues in teaching translation, namely selecting suitable texts for in-class translation training. Translation belongs to the core courses in the study programme “Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication” at the Faculty of Applied Languages, University of Economics in Bratislava. For the text to be selected for the purpose of its didactisation, and in this way to contribute to the development of translation skills, it has to fulfil numerous criteria. The focus of this paper is on text topic and its content, text type, text length, and degree of text complexity. Learners need to be prepared for diverse situations; therefore they have to be exposed to diverse text types in terms of topic and genres. As far as the criterion of text length is concerned, we consider shorter texts more suitable for training translation, because they enable teachers to work with several texts within one lesson unit and study texts on various topics. We deal with the text complexity in terms of content, as well as syntactic structures and lexical density. Text complexity has to be adapted to learners’ language, professional and cultural level of students. Features of this kind of text and criteria of text selection described in the paper are based on domestic and international sources as well as on authors’ experience in teaching translation and their own translation activities.
Highlights
In recent decades, but in particular after Slovakia‘s admission to the European Union, translation studies as the science of translation and interpretation started to rise in importance as an accompanying phenomenon of approximation of the Union‘s countries in economy, politics, culture and social sciences
Translation contributes to facilitating the communication between two or more partners, each of whom speaks only their mother tongue. This is one of the key reasons why the course in translation and interpretation occupies an important place in the academic curricula at the Faculty of Applied Languages, University of Economics in Bratislava and belongs to the core courses in the study programme in ―Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication‖ offered by this institution
The focus of this paper is on the criteria of selecting a suitable text in terms of text topic and content, text type, text length, and degree of text complexity
Summary
The authors deal with one of the key issues in teaching translation, namely selecting suitable texts for in-class translation training. The focus of this paper is on text topic and its content, text type, text length, and degree of text complexity. As far as the criterion of text length is concerned, we consider shorter texts more suitable for training translation, because they enable teachers to work with several texts within one lesson unit and study texts on various topics. Text complexity has to be adapted to learners‘ language, professional and cultural level of students. Features of this kind of text and criteria of text selection described in the paper are based on domestic and international sources as well as on authors‘ experience in teaching translation and their own translation activities
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