Translation Teaching Research Articles

Review of Translation Teaching for Postgraduates of Non-English Majors (2003-2023)

As international exchange continues to expand and intensify, E-C (English-Chinese) translation teaching for postgraduates of non-English majors, aimed at nurturing interdisciplinary talents equipped with both professional knowledge and pragmatic competence, has garnered widespread attention. Domestic scholars have explored the aspects of “teaching” and “learning” in E-C translation teaching for postgraduates of non-English majors from multiple dimensions. This paper reviews E-C translation teaching for postgraduates of non-English majors in China in the past two decades based on representative studies, sorts out the focus and current status of research, and looks forward to the future development of teaching practice. We found that universities generally advocate and adopt interdisciplinary teaching methods that integrate “foreign language” into “majors”, and E-C translation teaching for postgraduates of non-English majors also revealed aspects that urgently need to be improved. Therefore, reviewing and reflecting on research related to translation teaching and proposing targeted measures based on its current teaching challenges have extremely important theoretical and practical significance.

L1 and translation use in EFL classrooms: A quantitative survey on teachers’ attitudes in Kazakhstani secondary schools

This study, involving 100 Kazakhstani secondary school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers selected through convenience sampling, aims to explore their attitudes towards incorporating learners' first language (L1) and translation in English teaching. The results of a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire unveil a mixed attitude among teachers. They acknowledge the efficacy of integrating L1 and translation as pedagogical tools in language teaching while strongly favouring English-only instruction. This preference is influenced by institutional factors such as curricula, the opinions of colleagues, and textbooks, all of which actively promote English-only instruction. Additionally, the analysis of contextual variables, such as teaching experience, academic level, school type, class size, and language proficiency, suggests that the extent of L1 and translation use also depends on teachers' and learners' English language proficiency, school type, and class size. This research provides empirical insights into the use of L1 and translation in EFL classrooms and contributes to the broader discourse on language pedagogy and translation in language teaching (TILT). The findings suggest important implications for teachers, school administrators, textbook writers, and researchers, calling for a critical re-evaluation of current educational policies and tasks in English textbooks.

Using Metacognitive Questionnaires to Develop Translator Trainees’ Strategic Sub-competence: A Case Study

The status quo in higher education around the globe has shifted from teacher-centered approaches to learner-centered ones. Yet, researchers in the field of translation teaching argue that advances made in teaching and learning in other educational areas are not apparent in translation classrooms. Although translator educators embrace learner-centered approaches, more efforts are required to make translation training classrooms more learner-centered. Translator educators must meet this challenging transition if they wish to achieve the goals of 21st-century education. Research in the field of education has shown that metacognition can help learners be in charge of their learning. Thus, this study seeks to develop translation trainees’ strategic sub-competence through the use of metacognitive questionnaires. The results of this study confirm the positive effect of metacognitive questionnaires on the development of translation trainees’ strategic sub-competence. The findings also show an increase in planning and evaluation strategies and a shift from focusing on individual words to paying more attention to the target text.

Machine translation in English language teaching

Abstract In this series, we explore technology-related themes and topics. The series aims to discuss and demystify what may be new areas for some readers and to consider their relevance for English language teachers.

The "machine translation + post-machine translation editing" model on the YiCAT platform: using the example of the discipline "Stylistic post-machine text editing" for first-year graduate students of the Higher School of Translation of Moscow State University

In this article, the author analyzes the process of machine translation and post-machine editing by Chinese students in classes on the discipline "Stylistic post-machine text editing" using the YiCAT translation platform, which uses a model of combining machine translation and post-machine editing in order to organize the educational process and allocate study time. In 2017, the Russian government approved the "Digital Economy Plan of the Russian Federation", as a result of which the digitalization process gradually penetrated into all scientific spheres. The author of the article concludes that Russian universities should pay more attention to teaching machine translation and post-machine translation editing. In addition, the article presents the idea that the translation departments of modern universities should focus on the introduction and application of translation technologies and the latest translation tools in the framework of teaching translation skills. There are only a few hundred articles in Russia dealing with the specifics of machine translation. Most of them are devoted to the study of existing limitations, development opportunities and ways to improve machine translation systems. At the same time, there are extremely few articles dealing with the features of post-machine editing of the translation text. The number of such articles does not exceed several dozen. Thus, there are many challenges in the field of post-machine translation editing research that should be addressed as soon as possible so that the field of post-machine translation editing can correspond to the era of artificial intelligence. At the same time, Russian universities should pay attention to the teaching of disciplines involving machine translation tools and post-machine editing skills. Large translation faculties should actively use translation technologies and machine translation tools in the classroom, add new academic disciplines implying the familiarization and application of such technologies and tools by students, as well as integrate such disciplines into the framework of existing training programs for specialists in the field of translation. All this will allow universities to form a reliable basis for the education of modern and qualified specialists who meet the requirements of the new era.

Motivational beliefs as predictors of academic achievement of translation students: a situated expectancy-value theory perspective

ABSTRACT Despite a growing consensus on the function of motivation in translation and its learning, it is unclear whether different motivational beliefs can invariably predict translation learning outcomes. Informed by the expectancy-value theory of motivation, this paper considers to what extent a set of motivational beliefs (i.e. expectancy for success, intrinsic value, extrinsic value, and emotional cost) can predict students’ translation learning achievement and self-perceived translation proficiency. The data for the present study include the achievement data of 279 undergraduate students and their responses to a questionnaire. Results from partial least squares structural equation modelling showed that the participants’ expectancy for success directly predicted their achievement and self-perceived translation proficiency, whereas their intrinsic value, extrinsic value, and emotional cost only indirectly affected these two outcome variables. These results provide evidence of the relative importance of motivational beliefs in predicting translation learning outcomes. This study contributes new insights into the psychological aspect of translation learning and has implications for translation teaching.

Cross-modal knowledge distillation for continuous sign language recognition

Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) is a task which converts a sign language video into a gloss sequence. The existing deep learning based sign language recognition methods usually rely on large-scale training data and rich supervised information. However, current sign language datasets are limited, and they are only annotated at sentence-level rather than frame-level. Inadequate supervision of sign language data poses a serious challenge for sign language recognition, which may result in insufficient training of sign language recognition models. To address above problems, we propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation method for continuous sign language recognition, which contains two teacher models and one student model. One of the teacher models is the Sign2Text dialogue teacher model, which takes a sign language video and a dialogue sentence as input and outputs the sign language recognition result. The other teacher model is the Text2Gloss translation teacher model, which targets to translate a text sentence into a gloss sequence. Both teacher models can provide information-rich soft labels to assist the training of the student model, which is a general sign language recognition model. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple commonly used sign language datasets, i.e., PHOENIX 2014T, CSL-Daily and QSL, the results show that the proposed cross-modal knowledge distillation method can effectively improve the sign language recognition accuracy by transferring multi-modal information from teacher models to the student model. Code is available at https://github.com/glq-1992/cross-modal-knowledge-distillation_new.

Tourism Terminology and its Difficulties in Translation

Teaching English for the Applied Modern Languages specialisations for almost 15 years I have reached the conclusion that teaching translation to non-philological students is a tricky process. Moreover, teaching idioms, expressions, specialized vocabulary related to travelling and tourism proves to be a real challenge for students. The present study focuses on a constrastive investigation of Tourism terminology in English and Romanian. This paper scratched the surface of what a corpus can reaveal and may give you a flavour of the possibilities open to further research.

When minds meet machines: A pilot programme of using Chat-GPT to teach political speech translation in a Chinese-to-English translation classroom

This piece of reflection draws on a pilot programme of using Chat-GPT in the teaching of political speech translation in a Chinese-to-English translation classroom. The conduction of this pilot was driven by, among others, a growing concern by the third-year undergraduates doing Chinese-English translation as their major; they have aired worries that human translators might be replaced by large language models capable of doing the translation. The students observed and compared the human translation (by institutional interpreters) and the Chat-GPT translation of four political speeches delivered by Chinese government officials at the General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly. While acknowledging some strengths of Chat-GPT, they found that the GPT translation stayed too ‘close’ to the source text Chinese, potentially leading to issues at the lexical, sentence, and contextual levels. The author (also the course convenor) then reflected on the strengths and limitations of Chat-GPT in conjunction with pedagogical considerations regarding the ethical and practical implications of GPT-enabled machine translation. The paper concludes that GPT is not, and will not be, an adequate substitute for the language expertise, cultural awareness, ideological sensitivity, and creative abilities to ‘re-write’ on the part of professional human translators.

Subtitling Strategies of Buya Hamka Vol.1 Movie and Its Implication for Teaching Translation

The existences of subtitling (a part of audiovisual translation) in assisting people from other countries to enjoy movies have been new breakthroughs yet challenges to film industries. Nowadays, many Indonesian movies present the richness of local languages such as Javanese language, Minangkabau language, Batak language, and other local languages accompanied by English subtitles, so the movies can be watched not only by Indonesian audiences, but also viewers from other countries. One of the movies is Buya Hamka Vol.1 movie. This study aims to reveal the subtitling strategies used in Buya Hamka Vol.1 movie and its implication to teaching translation. This was a qualitative study with content analysis design. The data were the excerpts of conversations using Minangkabaunese (source language) compared to the correspond English (target language) subtitle provided by Netflix, and were analysed by using subtitling strategies theory by Gottlieb. The result showed that transfer is the most frequently strategy found in the study because of the common word order pattern employed in Minangkabaunese and English.

THE ROLE OF TRANSLATION STUDIES IN GERMAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE STUDIES

The aim of this research is to examine students’ attitudes and experiences regarding translation classes in German language and literature studies. This quantitative and qualitative research was conducted on the basis of a questionnaire with third-year students who, as part of the compulsory course Modern German Language 5, attended translation classes in the winter semester, with two classes a week. The results of the conducted questionnaire represent an over- view of the current status and role of translation studies in the classes of German as a foreign language in the German language and literature studies department at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Niš. The results of the research indicate to what extent translation studies affects the process of learning German as a foreign language and how translation teaching can be improved in order for students to acquire linguistic and translation competence. In addition to the practical significance of the research for translation classes, the work also has a theoretical significance, since various approaches and theories in the teaching of translation are present- ed that thematize translational categories (also areas of linguistics) such as lexicon, semantics, pragmatics, etc. and the means by which the process and product of translation are described or reflected. Many aspects of translation (understanding, intention, communication, mediation, communication, etc.) are reflected and intertwined in the attitudes of the students.

Evaluation of Indonesian to English Translation at the Undergraduate Level Using Componential Assessment

Background. The ability to translate is a crucial skill for EFL students and helps overcome language barriers. This study investigates the improvement of translation skills at Universitas Indraprasta PGRI and explains the types of componential assessment (skills assessment) as an effective translation strategy to increase students' proficiency. Purpose. This study aims to improve translation skills among students at Universitas Indraprasta PGRI by using componential assessment as a strategy to enhance their proficiency. Method. An undergraduate class of fifty students in a Translation course participated in this study. The research utilizes a sequential explanatory design, beginning with an Indonesian-to-English translation proficiency test followed by a content analysis of the translations. The study focuses on assessing lexical-semantic, cultural, pragmatic, and grammatical skills through componential assessment. Results. The quantitative results indicated that the quality of translations was generally poor. The primary reason for this was the participants' insufficient mastery of both Indonesian and English, which made achieving equivalency challenging. The qualitative analysis revealed that students faced difficulties in several areas:Lexical-semantic skills; Cultural skills; Pragmatic skills; Grammatical skills. Translation mistakes were predominantly found in grammar, specifically: Pluralization; Capitalization; Inflection of words; Present tense usage; Agreement between subject and verb participles; Use of demonstrative pronouns and fragments representing them. Conclusion. The findings of this study highlight the importance of effective translation teaching methods, particularly in Indonesian universities where students are expected to have a strong command of both Indonesian and English. Improving these methods can significantly enhance students' translation skills and overall language proficiency.

LINGUODIDACTIC PRINCIPLES OF DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE FOR SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION TEACHERS

This article identifies and describes the language teaching principles for the formation of professional competence in simultaneous interpretation teachers. An analysis of domestic and foreign theoretical and practical research reveals that the problem of developing professional competence for simultaneous interpretation teachers, despite its undeniable significance, is still in the early stages of study. In the scientific, pedagogical, and translation discourses, the search for effective solutions has only just begun. Determining the linguodidactic principles of preparing translation teachers in general and forming their professional competence provides the basis for a comprehensive study of this complex issue. It is established that the professional competence of a translation teacher is an integrative characteristic of personality, which presupposes the formation of a complex of necessary competencies for effective pedagogical and translation activities, including various components of pedagogy and translation, and pedagogical communication within the framework of intercultural communication. The professional competence of a simultaneous interpreter is a complex formation that includes both general translation competencies, reflecting the main functions of translation activities, and specific competencies necessary for oral interpretation, including the simultaneous one (as readiness and ability to perceive and understand the oral speech of communicators from different cultures, to transmit it by the communication situation, genre, style, and register; ability to immerse oneself in situations of interlingual and intercultural interaction; ability to activate necessary competencies for translation and teaching activities; readiness for enriching communicative experience while mobilizing already developed skills and abilities; capacity for reflection and self-reflection). Linguodidactic principles of developing professional competence for simultaneous interpretation teachers are defined, taking into account the interdisciplinary nature of this process, namely: pedagogical, translation studies, linguistic, and psychological principles, without which it is impossible to organize the training process for future specialists qualitatively.

Exploring Students' Perceptions and Influences in Teaching Translation Through Qualitative and Quantitative Standards

The present study addresses the multifaceted aspects of teaching translation by investigating students' perceptions and influences, considering both qualitative and quantitative standards. It explores the contributions of these standards to the translation teaching process and evaluates the predictive capability of quantitative standards. Focusing on 183 male and female students from Saida and El-Bayah Universities, the study used a questionnaire to collect data and statistical analysis using SPSS techniques. The findings showed a positive correlation between students' perceptions of teaching translation and both qualitative and quantitative standards. Furthermore, these standards were found to make significant contributions to teaching translation, indicating that teaching translation may be predicted using quantitative criteria. The study offers insightful information that can be used for enhancing translation programs, creating engaging learning environments, and improving teacher training in diverse educational contexts.

MADM framework based on interval-valued neutrosophic aczel-alsina power average operator and application to translation teaching quality evaluation of college English

The huge demand for translation talents has prompted the universities to focus on improving the quality of translation teaching. As a necessary means to improve the quality of teaching, translation teaching quality evaluation plays a role in guiding, regulating and managing translation teaching, which is an important part of translation teaching. The translation teaching quality evaluation of college English is viewed as the multiple attribute decision making (MADM). The interval-valued neutrosophic sets (IVNSs) are used as an effective tool for characterizing uncertain information during the translation teaching quality evaluation of college English. In this paper, interval-valued neutrosophic number (IVNN) Aczel-Alsina power average (IVNNAAPA) operator is proposed based on the classical Aczel-Alsina operator and power average (PA) operator. Then, IVNNAAPA operator is employed to cope with MADM problem. Finally, the numerical decision example for translation teaching quality evaluation of college English is employed to illustrate the produced method and some comparative models are used to prove the effectiveness of the IVNNAAPA method.

Exploring Student Perceptions of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) in Translation Courses

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) is regarded as one of the most significant models for showcasing students' perceptions in translation courses. This study was undertaken to investigate the perceptions of both novice and experienced translation students from institute Pendidikan dan Bahasa Invada regarding the utilization of technological pedagogical content knowledge in professional development teaching. In pursuit of the study's three objectives, the mixmethod method was utilized by the two authors due to its appropriateness. Data gathering involved distributing a 20-item questionnaire to a purposive sample comprising 75 novice and experienced and female translation students chosen from institute Pendidikan dan Bahasa Invada during 2021/2022. Additionally, a significant proportion of the instructors demonstrated an average level of knowledge regarding TPACK. Their perceptions towards TPACK were notably positive. Moreover, the study's results highlighted the substantial role of educational backgrounds in digital technologies in the professional development of novice and experienced translation instructors at IPB Cirebon. The study's implications were deliberated upon, with recommendations proposed to equip all institution in cirebon with educational software, e-learning platforms, teaching software, and to provide novice and experienced translation students’ with sessions on new digital skills, cybersecurity workshops, and innovative digital skills training.

Construction of a Multimedia Instructional Effect Assessment System of College Foreign Language Translation Based on Artificial Intelligence

The teaching evaluation module is an important guarantee of teaching effectiveness, and as an important part of the multimedia teaching system, it needs special attention. This paper combines artificial intelligence and multimedia teaching effect evaluation, proposes a foreign language translation multimedia teaching effect evaluation model based on improved support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, and provides theoretical support for the construction of foreign language translation multimedia teaching effect evaluation system. The results show that the accuracy of this assessment algorithm is improved by 22.18% compared with the traditional assessment algorithm. Therefore, it is theoretically feasible to use the improved SVM to analyse the application effect of multimedia teaching mode in foreign language translation teaching. It can be found that the automatic acquisition of model data, the cumulative search of spatial knowledge and the adaptive control of the search phase of the optimised SVM algorithm have also been significantly improved, and conclusions drawn are more reliable.

A Study on Strategies of Translation Teaching in Colleges and Universities in Cross-Cultural Backgrounds

As the process of economic globalisation accelerates, there are constant cultural conflicts and fusions among countries in communication, so it is necessary to cultivate students' cross-cultural translation ability in translation teaching in colleges and universities. Colleges and universities should adopt an open and inclusive teaching method to improve translation ability, especially in the classroom, paying attention to the actual communication and cultural cultivation among students. This paper aims to cultivate a group of excellent translators who can be recognised in the workplace and can serve the society through cross-cultural translation. Meanwhile, reforming the teaching of translation is also conducive to improving the quality of teaching and the teaching conditions.

Exploring the Gap: The Challenge of Achieving Human-like Generalization for Concept-based Translation Instruction Using Large Language Models

Our study utilizes concept description instructions and few-shot learning examples to examine the effectiveness of a large language model (GPT-4) in generating Chinese-to-English translations that embody related translation concepts. We discovered that human language experts possess superior abductive reasoning skills compared to GPT-4. Therefore, it is crucial for humans to employ abductive reasoning to craft more detailed instructions and infuse additional logic into exemplary prompts, a step essential for guiding a large language model effectively, in contrast to the more intuitive understanding a human expert might have. This approach would make the prompt engineering process more complicated and less human-like. Emphasizing domain-specific abductive reasoning stands out as a crucial aspect of human-like learning that AI/ML systems based on large language models should aim to replicate.

The Implementation Strategies of MTI Translation Teaching from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

This paper is mainly concerned with the implications of cognitive linguistics for MTI translation teaching, with an emphasis on the implementation strategies and teaching procedures. Cognitive linguistics sheds new light on translation teaching by focusing on the translation process itself and regarding translation as a cognitive activity of the translation subject. The three major steps of translation teaching include both the design of the framework structure and the handling of the details, reflecting the teaching philosophy of teachers as “guiders” and “facilitators” and students as “active constructors of knowledge meaning”, which provides practical ideas for the adjustment of translation teaching.