Translation Learning Research Articles

Balancing University Teaching and Media Industry Needs: A Case Study of Teaching Finance and Economics News Translation

This research uses case study research and employs a news translation module to analyse its synergic teaching method which includes a university teacher, an industry insider and translation learners. They, as the key stakeholders of the teaching and learning process, have their specific roles and continuously interact with each other. Through these interactions, actual trans-editing workflow is embedded into the university classroom. In order to examine the teaching effectiveness of such an innovative model, translation learners’ responses and commentaries are carefully taken into consideration. A wider implication of this research is that translator trainers may have their own reflections on innovating teaching strategies via the integration of academia and the professional world.

A study about information literacy of undergraduate translation learners

A study about information literacy of undergraduate translation learners

The impact of translation on L2 learners’ metalinguistic competence

This paper investigates the effect of translation courses and language proficiency on learners’ metalinguistic knowledge at Isfahan University, Iran. Tests of Metalinguistic knowledge, language proficiency and a background questionnaire were administered to learners of translation fields of study (as the experimental group) and the control group of English literature learners at Isfahan University, Iran. Each of translation and literature groups were further ranked into 4 groups by their language proficiency. It was found that learners’ metalinguistic ability and their language proficiency are not correlated. Multivariate analyses indicated that both groups did not show any awareness of certain properties of language as MLK. However, it was shown that Translation learners were better at language analytic section of the metalinguistic test. It is suggested that translation courses can increase the learners’ language analytic ability. The importance and the theoretical implications of the results are also counted for language teaching and testing.

Study on the Application of Web Information Retrieval in the Teaching of Language Translation

The development of information technology at the end of the 20th century fundamentally transformed people’s daily lives and greatly influenced education as well, actually not all the undergraduate students of translation have the skills to access, utilize, and benefit from the continually updating online information. This poses a challenge to traditional orthodox translation teaching which is still dominant. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce Web Information Retrieval (WIR) skills to the translation learners. This research focuses on the translation curriculum reform and the effects of incorporating WIR in translation teaching. From data tests, questionnaires, and curriculum experiment prove that WIR incorporating significantly improves translation quality, translators and translation instructors both request that WIR skills should be incorporated in the teaching of language Translation.

Error Assessment in the Translation of Some English Collocations into Arabic: A Case Study of English Department Students at University of Benghazi, EL-Marj Campus, Libya.

One of the main issues that encounter translation learners in the field of translation is collocation. This work aims to identify the students’ deficiencies when attempting to render some English collocations into Arabic. This is done through identifying the major problems that students face when rendering collocations from English into Arabic. Another aim of this work is to discover if there is a difference in meaning in terms of the frequency of a word in the English collocation when rendering into the target, Arabic. Examining these issues depended on a collection of some English collocations samples to be rendered into Arabic. The subjects were undergraduate students from English department, University of Benghazi, EL-Marj Campus. They were chosen randomly from Semester seven. The reason for choosing this semester is that they should have a strong background on English culture, and they have tackled different subjects regarding English cultural and linguistic disparities in their past semesters. They were given two hours to translate these collocations into Arabic. Only general English-Arabic dictionaries were allowed. i.e ‘not collocation dictionaries’ in order to see how these students can transfer them into English and what are the problems they might encounter. Their samples were analysed and recommendations were made in this study.

Rationales for Cooperative Tasks in Taiwan Translation Learning

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.

The self-directed learner: intentionality in translator training and education

This study seeks to bring educational theory on self-directedness to bear on translator training, and to document ways intentional learning for autonomy are being fostered, or could be. Our project connects to ongoing scholarly efforts toward establishing learner autonomy and empowerment as a priority goal in translator training and education. However, here we also wish to take stock of, and reflect more on, what autonomy means in principle, its connection to student development (intra- and inter-) personally and pre-professionally, self-directed learning's (SDL) relationship to current learning methods, supports and role definitions we can use in our instruction, and the learning behaviors, motivations and outcomes we can expect. In the process, we will examine the extent to which related self-directedness practices now emerging can be integrated into awareness and thus help translation learners advance toward intentionality.

Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

While a number of studies have dealt with the use of corpus linguistics resources in the education of translation trainees, and a large body of literature exists on the use of corpora for second language learning activities, the relevance of corpus-based translation activities in second language learning settings has been explored to a lesser extent. This paper argues that translation can be a legitimate type of activity for ESL learners and that integrating corpus resources into second-language writing and translating means supplementing the traditional learning grammar of “dictionary items + combinatory rules” with a novel learning grammar of “corpora + rules for querying and analyzing them”. Examples are presented from a course in English as a foreign language delivered to Italian postgraduate students of international relations. Students were asked to revise an MT translation of a short text from an academic or journalistic source related to international relations, and then write an essay explaining how they used corpora and corpus linguistics techniques to evaluate and revise the translation. Students’ performance varied both in terms of the final translation produced and in the way and degree to which they used corpus resources, and it appears that the students who mostly benefited from the course were those who were able to both formulate better hypotheses and linguistic queries, and to analyze the results of different corpus resources. While the course was aimed at language rather than translation learners, the results also have clear implications for the latter.