Training translation teachers in an initial teacher education programme: a self-efficacy beliefs perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACTMost of the translation programmes around the world focus more on training professional translators or translation researchers, and less on translation teachers. As a consequence, there is little experience of teacher training available in the discipline of translation studies, even though there is high demand for well-trained translation teachers. In this article, we first present the initial teacher education programme, called the Master of Arts (MA) in Translation Education, that has been running for several years at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China. Then, we report an exploratory study that examines the influences of the programme on pre-service translation teachers in terms of their self-efficacy beliefs in translating, teaching and research. By analysing the interview and the focus group data from the six participants, we found that in general the programme had positive influences on the development of self-efficacy beliefs of the participants, suggesting that the training of translation teachers could be a success when it is conducted in a formal and systematic way. The findings of the study provide some implications regarding the training of, and research on, translation teachers.