Handbook on Translation and Interpretation Didactics

1. Introduction

This chapter sets out to outline the major trends in translator education from the past to the present, which is intended as a springboard from which to indicate issues that should be addressed in the future. The title of the chapter is a deliberate play on the American English expression, “to be caught between a rock and a hard place”, meaning to be in a difficult situation where one or more hard decisions are necessary. In a sense, translator education is now being confronted with such decisions or choices for the future. In particular, this chapter seeks to highlight the growing perception in the language industry, and in the practice and research of translator education, that transferable skills, often referred to as “soft skills”, have an increasingly central role to play in graduate skill sets, which brings with it a number of challenges for educators.

The chapter begins by reviewing, in summary form, the key developments in translation didactics from their beginnings to a present characterized by competence-oriented tasking and collaborative experiential learning. Against this background, it considers the development of translator competence modelling and discusses the extent to which the way translator competence is currently conceived meets both educational needs and the employability goals set by a dynamic, diversifying language industry job market. In addition to the imperative of maintaining state-of-the-art digital literacy and core mediation skills, particular emphasis is placed on the way in which the development of so-called soft skills has been progressively converging with the hard skills needed by the profession to occupy a more central role in competence models and job profiles, despite their evident lack of definition and demarcation.

The chapter attempts to account for this deficit and propose the contours needed to be properly hardened up in order to distinguish such skills from the hard ones that were long considered core to translator competence. It also considers how skills and competences might be assessed, and how the inherent complexity of assessing soft or transferable skills can potentially provide the impetus to introduce a more holistic, peri- and post-curricular form of assessment for integrated skills and competence development based on the portfolio concept. Finally, after focusing on student learning, it will end by briefly examining the growing need for translation teacher development, a somewhat neglected field in professional translation didactics but one which is indispensable if the demands of the current and future language industry are to be met by graduates able to call upon a repertoire of necessary hard and transferable soft skills.

2. Background: A brief overview of trends in translator education

Early approaches to translator education could best be defined as teacher-centric, exemplifying what Kelly (2010: 389) calls an essentially “apedagogical” transmissionist epistemology based on what in French is known as the “performance magistrale” [masterly performance], a term used pejoratively by Kiraly (1995: 7) to designate mono-dimensional behaviourist instruction. It is most clearly expressed in Newmark’s (1991: 130) contention that success in teaching translation depends “65 % on the personality of the teacher, 20 % on the course design and 15 % on the course materials”. Something of a turning point was reached by Delisle’s (1980) systematic objectives-based didactics of professional translation. He proposes a practical introductory course in translation based on a number of teaching objectives, which marked an evolution in translation didactics for the rest of the 20th century, although there is a strong argument that the transmissionist tradition has persisted in many translation teachers’ self-concepts (see Kiraly 2000: 23, 2012: 83, 2019: 2–6 Massey & Brändli 2019: 156–157). The importance of Delisle lies in the way he called for clear learning objectives combined with adequate tools, activities and methods of assessment (Kelly 2005: 12).

At around the same time, the rise of skopos (Reiss & Vermeer 1984) and translational action theory (Holz-Mänttäri 1984) saw functionalist models applied to translation teaching, including the widening integration of purpose-driven professional practice through simulated and authentic real-world work assignments. It represented an important shift towards learner-centred education more closely related to the professional reality of translation, best seen in Nord’s influential work of the 1990s (e.g., Nord 1997: 39–79). Her model gives prominence to the particular communicative purposes of a given translation, operationalized in translation tasks involving a translation brief (which specifies target-text function(s), receivers, time, place and medium of reception, and the motive behind an assignment), complementary source-text analysis (as a basis for decisions on the feasibility of an assignment, the relevance of source-text units to a functional translation and the choice of translation strategies that best meet the requirements of the brief) and the hierarchization of problems and errors to assess learner performance.

During the 1980s and 1990s, empirical research began emerging to validate didactic approaches that had been derived largely from theoretical models. A growing number of empirical studies on cognitive translation processes and exploratory translation process research (TPR) studies fed into attempts to elaborate a descriptive translation pedagogy “based on the accurate theoretical description of translation practice” and provide a theoretical model backed by hard empirical evidence about the knowledge and skills involved in professional translation (Kiraly 1995: 3). On the basis of data from think-aloud protocols (TAPs), Kiraly (1995: 99–109), for example, proposes a psycholinguistic model of translation processes to serve teaching. He (Kiraly 1995: 110–112) elaborates on various entry points for didactic interventions, ranging from the “significant teaching resource” of error analysis to provide students with guided practice and fostering a professional translator self-concept and self-monitoring capacity, to organizing a programme that progressively scales up from automatic bilingual communicative skills to conscious problem-solving and quality control strategies.

As Massey (2017: 497–506) points out, early cognitive TPR grew out of a didactic interest in the nature and the acquisition of translation competence, and it is TPR that has furnished the bulk of empirical evidence for students’ cognitive development since this period. It has produced key evidence, for example, that learners tend to concentrate on lexical and syntactic solutions to perceived problems, while professional translators check for stylistic and text-type adequacy and advanced trainees reflected on their audience. Professionals exhibit more task-specific variation, have more balanced cognitive rhythms, higher levels of self-monitoring, and greater decision-making confidence. Beginners, on the other hand, allocate more visual attention to the source text than professionals, most likely due to comprehension issues, whereas professionals demonstrated a greater focus on the target text for purposes of evaluation and revision.

The relevance of TPR was quickly recognized by Colina (2003: 16–20), who seeks to “connect theory and research to teaching practice” (Colina 2003: 1). She employs empirical data from error analysis and TAP studies to show how novice translators are distracted by the formal structure of language and fail to consider key communicative functions and pragmatic situational features. Her proposal is to design courses on the basis of functionalist principles in order to fill such gaps in students’ knowledge and skills, for which she devises a series of concrete activities that focus on textual, generic and situational factors as well as their impact on specific translation strategies.

The functionalist commitment to real-world professional translatorial action reflects a growing trend towards situated learning in authentic project-based settings that began in the 1990s (e.g., Vienne 1994). It has since become a widespread approach in translator education (e.g., González Davies & Enríquez Raído 2017; Kiraly & Massey 2019). Its most vociferous advocate is Kiraly (2000), whose social constructivist model of translator education proposes holistic student learning through the enactment of authentic collaborative translation projects, guided by teachers who provide appropriate scaffolding to foster learner autonomy and empowerment. The social constructivist approach “holds that meaning, knowledge, and the mind itself are inextricably embedded in our personal interactions with other people” (Kiraly 2000: 7) and adopts a transformationist position on learning and expertise development as “a personal, holistic, intrinsically motivating and socially effectuated construction process” (Kiraly 2000: 23). The basic didactic design consists of collaborative student teamwork with optimally invasive teacher intervention and guidance to complete authentic translation assignments with real-world clients, briefs, deadlines and, in many cases, publication of the target documents (Massey & Brändli 2019: 149–150). The teachers become “partners in learning rather than distributors of knowledge”, while their students are “proactive seekers of knowledge” (Kiraly 2013: 214–215). A range of qualitative studies have been used to validate the approach, with reported outcomes including increased student responsibility, autonomy, critical reflection, self-regulation, motivation and self-efficacy (Kiraly & Massey 2019).

By 2013, Kiraly had explicitly rejected earlier componential models of translation competence, including his own (Kiraly 2006), because of the positivist assumptions underlying them and for the way they compartmentalize skills both conceptually and in curriculum design (Kiraly 2013: 201; Kiraly & Hofmann 2019: 62–63). Instead, Kiraly (2013: 209) stresses the “translatory moment” of socially situated, embodied expert translator competence, where decision-making processes are “uniquely adapted to each new translation problem” (Kiraly 2013: 209), and cognition is recognized as “embodied enaction” (Kiraly 2013: 207, 214), driving an emergentist “holistic experiential” pedagogy (Kiraly 2012: 87).

Despite misgivings over compartmentalization, collaborative experiential learning has been shown to benefit from competence-based tasking (González Davies 2004: 13–15; Kelly 2007: 138–139), which continues to play a central part in translation didactics, and which is the methodology considered by Pengyuan Shen in greater depth in Chapter 6 of the present volume. It involves staged tasks of increasing complexity designed to develop the sub-competences needed to attain translation competence. Quite obviously, the tasking is derived from componential models of translation competence, one of the most influential being the PACTE (2003: 58) model. It presents translation competence as a set of interacting sub-competences–bilingual, extralinguistic, knowledge about translation, instrumental and strategic – supported by the activation of psycho-physiological components.

The PACTE group claims to have empirically validated their model over a period of some twenty years in a series of TPR investigations (PACTE 2020). Their research has led to the development of the NACT¹ translation competence framework (e.g., PACTE 2018), a set of performance level descriptors for translator training and assessment: language competence, cultural, world knowledge and thematic competence, instrumental competence, translation service provision competence, and translation problem-solving competence – the central strategic competence governing the deployment of all the others to solve various problem types.

The major parts of the PACTE competence model are shared variously by others: the empirically researched TransComp model (Göpferich 2009), explicitly based on the PACTE group’s, and Kelly’s (2005: 32–33) heuristic, which seeks to equip students with the cognitive, professional and social skills to embark on a career spanning different fields, domains and activities. Many parts of the latter subsequently fed into the equally didactic European Master’s in Translation (EMT) competence profile for professional translators (EMT Expert Group 2009). The EMT model indicates a move away from translation competence to translator competence, first proposed by Kiraly (2000: 13), which essentially represents providing language services as a fully integrated member of the professional translator community (Way 2020: 184). Its major follow-up, the 2017 EMT Competence Framework (EMT Board 2017), goes even further by focusing on socio-technical knowledge and putting much more emphasis on socio-cognitive personal and interpersonal competences in contexts of work. The framework thus mirrors the progressive shift towards a cognitive translatology paradigm (e.g., Muñoz Martín 2016) inspired by models which extend human cognition to individuals’ physical and social situation and present it as embodied, embedded, extended, enacted and affective (4EA cognition).

Models of situated 4EA cognition have consequences for translation didactics. They recognize the interdependence of translators with their human and technological work environments, and by extension they underpin social constructivist and emergentist approaches based on scaffolded authentic experiential learning. As a result, education and educators have been collaborating more systematically with the language industry, and employability is becoming a major aspect of translator education (Rodríguez de Céspedes et al. 2017). Authentic experiential learning such as mentorships and work placements (e.g., Astley & Torres Hostench 2017), or as translation projects, student translation companies, agency simulators, and so on (e.g., Buysschaert et al. 2017), have been repeatedly advocated, with growing importance being assigned to soft or transferable skills, entrepreneurship and personal attributes alongside hard technology skills, subject-specific knowledge and core linguistic, cultural and mediation knowledge and skills (Schnell & Rodríguez 2017; Galán-Mañas et al. 2020).

Soft, transferable skills and adaptability become all the more important for graduates competing in a market with rapidly diversifying jobs, roles and tasks. The language industry commentator Slator lists 600 different job titles for the industry in 2018 (Bond 2018) and 100 more two years later (Slator 2020: 11–17). Buyer intentions and needs are increasingly complex (Slator 2022: 15), and language service providers progressively see themselves as strategic business partners (Hickey & Agulló García 2021: 40) as they expand upstream of core translation and localization services to embrace more and more multilingual content creation, and downstream to offer a variety of services, such as compliance, accessibility, publishing, distribution and consultancy, as well as content, data and quality management.