Translating authentic technical documents in specialised translation classes

Anabel Galán-Mañas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Translated from Spanish by Roland Pearson

ABSTRACT

This article describes a learning experience which consists of adopting a project-based approach to translating authentic documents in a scientific-technical texts translation class. The aim is to provide students with the necessary competences so that they are able to work satisfactorily as a professional translator.

From a constructivist perspective, working on authentic scientific-technical documents in a translation class provides students with a setting well suited to not only developing degree-specific competences, but also general competences, such as working in a team, autonomously or using information and communications technologies (ICT).

Students perform better under this kind of approach because of the motivation factor: they deal with situations that crop up in the professional world, discover how other courses in their degree programme are inter-related, use ICT, work through the entire translation process and practice skills they will need to work as a professional translator.

KEYWORDS

Translator training, translation, technical translation, project-based learning.

1. Introduction

The framework document Integración del Sistema Universitario Español en el Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (MEC 2003) states that Spanish universities must equip students with the necessary competences so that they can work as professionals autonomously. This means that higher education institutions and employers should work together to identify market needs and provide training accordingly. This collaboration should also envisage real work experience for students as part of their training before they finish their studies.

However, this is not always the case in real life. On the one hand, the learning contents university students work on sometimes have little to do with the real job market while, on the other hand, the majority of students on internships only receive fragmented professional training.

As regards training translators, professional competence is one of the essential elements in any curriculum design (Hurtado Albir 1996: 34, 1999: 53; Robinson 2003: 49; González Davies 2003: 13; 2004: 20 and Kelly 2005: 17). Professional competence entails mastering the professional aspects of translation, and one way of familiarising students with the professional world is through project-based learning (from now on referred to as PBL). As Hurtado Albir (1992; 1996 and 1999) points out, this is an all-encompassing methodological approach which incorporates all the areas central to the educational process: objectives, contents, means and assessment.

Studies, such as the research carried out by the Canadian Translation Industry Sectoral Commission (1999: 19), stress that companies feel translation students are unprepared to deal with the demands of the job market when they leave university. Among the problems they point out are, lack of real practical experience and difficulty working autonomously.

To equip students with the necessary competences so that they can then work satisfactorily as professional translators requires adopting a constructivist approach that facilitates developing active learning methods in the classroom and working on real translation projects, as has been proposed by Hurtado Albir (1999: 49), Kiraly (2000: 60), González Davies (2003: 13), Baer and Koby (2003: vii-viii) and Kelly (2005: 76; 115). Translating real technical documents is invaluable not only for developing translation competence but also professional competence.

What follows is an account of a learning experience with students who took the undergraduate introductory course to scientific-technical translation in the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. It consisted of translating real technical documents and the objective was to provide students with the opportunity to work on a real translation brief which would entail working autonomously and in a team, using information and communications technology (hereafter referred to as ICT), applying interdisciplinary skills and thinking analytically.

2. Course design

2.1. Objectives

The objectives behind translating real documents in this scientific-technical translation class are as follows:

• To actively involve the students in their own learning process, by requiring them to reflect on the translation process, the resources they have to use, the time they need to invest and the results they have achieved.
• To familiarise students with working autonomously, as well as working in a team in which they have to develop communication, organisation and team-decision skills.
• To acquaint students with methods used by professional translators, and use the class to work on the kind of situations that crop up in the real work market.
• To establish correlations with the other areas they study in the undergraduate programme: translation studies, language acquisition, computing, information science and terminology.

2.2. Focus

In my proposal, authentic practice as a method for training professional scientific-technical translators revolves around three focal points:

• Authentic practice.
• Project-based learning (PBL).
• Applied ICT.

In my view these are particularly expedient given the current context of the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE).

a) Authentic practice

The first focal point for training professional scientific-technical translators is authentic practice, that is, working on real translation projects, such as translating an entire website, documents involved in the sale of equipment (sales agreement, technical specifications, user manuals, etc.), software with all the corresponding documentation —hard copy or electronic format— or an entire magazine etc.

Given that knowledge and skills have to be meaningful for the student, authentic practice provides an opportunity for inter-disciplinary learning in which the student has to incorporate the contents of other subjects into constructing their own knowledge (translation, terminology, information science and computing applied to translation). In fact, authentic practice is an approach advocated by a number of authors: Kiraly (2000 and 2005), Hurtado (1996 and 1999), González Davies (2003 and 2004) and Kelly (2005).

Authentic practice should not be confused with internships in a company, which are included in the curriculum and assigned credits separately. Instead, authentic practice means that the translation teacher, rather than asking students to translate any kind of text (which oftentimes can even be unrelated to the world of professional translation), requires students to work on a real (usually unpaid) translation. This entails having previously come to an agreement with a company or institution to send real texts for translation which students are able to do within a reasonable time frame, given the time restraints of the academic programme. Throughout the project, students can contact the client to resolve doubts regarding the translation brief and the final version, which they will have to send back to the client.

Despite all the advantages this kind of authentic practice offers for students, the drawback is the enormous work load for the teacher. As Lavault points out (1998: 368), the teacher needs to contact companies that can supply texts to work on, and able to do this at the right moment during the academic year, as students may not have enough time to finish the project if they are sent too late into the course. Lavault points out that the teacher must also see to it that the students divide up the tasks equally among themselves, supervise other students’ work and assess them.

b) Project-based learning (PBL)

PBL is a learning model in which students work on projects which go beyond the bounds of the classroom and can be applied to situations in the real world (Blank 1997; Dickinson et al. 1998 and Harwell 1997).

PBL is well suited to my proposal, because it facilitates developing medium and long-term interdisciplinary learning activities in which the student is involved in real tasks and works in a team as well as individually. In order to carry out these learning activities, students have to construct new knowledge based on what they already know, such as their experiences outside academic studies or those competences acquired from courses they have already taken, much along the lines of the scaffolding principle proposed by Bruner (1976: 89).

According to scaffolding, when students learn something they recall information from previous experiences, and their learning is most effective when they learn by discovery. This means that teachers need to help students to contextualise new contents in their background knowledge and provide opportunities to learn by doing.

The kind of tutoring students are given will depend on their level of competence to carry out the task. This means that at first, they will be given more guidance about which resources to use or work method; the objective here is that they are to work more and more independently.

In PBL the student reflects on and is actively involved in working on the project, draws up strategy plans, takes decisions, has to share ideas, negotiate and reach agreements with other members of the group, manage their time and see how other courses in the undergraduate programme are related. As Thomas (1998: 220) points out, projects encourage active inquiry and higher order thinking.

Working on projects is an approach which is well-suited to translating text genres in courses on specialised translation. At this stage in their learning, students can be given real translation briefs which involve all of the phases: from the time of receiving the brief to sending the final translation to the client, including “invoicing”.

c) Applied use of ICT

Using ICT is the third focal point in my proposal, although as pointed out by Archer (2002), Askehave (2000) and Olvera et al. (2007), technology alone does not enhance education, but rather how it is used. One of the advantages of ICT is that they facilitate communication between the teacher and students, among students themselves and between students and professionals (e.g. posting queries in specialised forums). So here, this technology facilitates working interactively and provides students with tools to overcome the constraints of distance and schedules.

Another advantage is that ICT allows students to handle large blocks of information, which is essential in specialised translation. In this respect it is advisable to give guidance to students about classifying and documenting all the information they need in the shortest time possible, saving it in formats for later retrieval as needed and gauging the information in terms of importance, accuracy and reliability.

But most important of all, translation students need to familiarise themselves with the tools they need to master to work professionally. In this regard we can talk of tools ranging from a standard word processor, Excel, Power Point (they need to be able to translate documents in these formats), Windows Explorer (setting up folder-subfolder hierarchies to save the documents), or a web browser to compile documentation and keep in touch with other group members, to CAT tools, such as Deja-Vu, Trados, Webbudget, and software for managing text corpora, such as WordsmithTools. Some of these programmes were already being recommended as far back as 1993 by Clark (1993: 301). However, I have not included CAT tools in my experience.

2.3. Description of the learning experience context

The learning experience described here required students to work on translation projects with authentic documents. The class itself is an introductory course to scientific-technical translation (English to Spanish), which was taught during two consecutive academic years: 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. The students in question were from the Translation and Interpreting undergraduate degree programme at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

This is a third-year class designed to provide basic training in scientific-technical translation through systematising ways of working and raising student awareness of problems posed by different text types generated from the fields of science and technology. 33 students participated during the academic year 2007-2008, and 35 in 2008-2009.

The authentic texts which the students had to translate were obtained from a foreign multinational robotics company with local premises. The texts included: six issues of a technical magazine published periodically for in-house distribution as well as for clients, and two technical specifications documents on robotic machinery sold by this company.

3. The learning experience phases

The projects were broken down into various phases, and efforts made to involve the students in planning and setting out guidelines in each phase. My belief was that, the more actively involved, the more aware they would be of what is expected from them, and more likely to take on responsibilities.

Phase 1. Planning, setting up groups and assigning tasks

For me, this was one of the fundamental phases, because at this stage success depended on the students having a clear grasp of the targets they had to reach, understanding the methodology involved in project work and how they could benefit from this, and contributing to defining criteria for working on the project, deadlines and final assessment.

This phase consisted of the following:

• Assigning source text documents
• The texts were divided up so that each student would have documents of approximately the same length and degree of difficulty. These materials were then distributed at random among the students.
• Assigning tasks
• The students themselves set up the work groups. The numbers for each group were kept to 4 or 5 students, consequently the number of groups in each class varied according to the number of students taking part in the exercise. Once the groups had been set up, the following tasks had to be assigned:
• Documenting: look for information and parallel texts on the subject field.
• Searching for terminology: systematically compile lists of specialised terminology and build a glossary.
• Translating: translate the text following the instructions in the previously defined translation brief.
• Proofing: revise and edit the text.
• Project manager: to coordinate the work done by the members of the group and draw up a simple style manual to guarantee coherence across the translations by the various members of the group, including considerations such as whether weights and measurements need to be converted, what to do with abbreviations and acronyms, etc.
• Establishing criteria. I explained the criteria for working on and assessing the project, as well as for correcting the translations (which students were already familiar with from previous tasks):
• Detailed explanation of the roles to be performed by each group member.
• Instructions for completing the project. Deadlines for handing in the work—to the teacher and to other members of the group— scheduled work meetings, guidelines for keeping a group diary, tutorial times and modalities, etc.).
• Criteria used for grading the project.

Phase 2. Working on the project

This phase consisted of working on the project step by step, for which a blended learning approach was adopted: students worked on some tasks in the classroom and others outside, particularly those which required working autonomously and generating texts. Since there were few class meeting, students needed to use virtual tools to keep in touch and work as a group. In this regard, students stated that they had used e-mail, text-based chat software, forums and document-sharing environments (in this particular case Google Docs). Some students also used SMS messages or called each other to set up meetings, whether face-to-face or in chat forums.

Some class time was set aside to allow for groups to meet and discuss as and when the need arose, particularly among groups with different tasks. An entire class session was set aside to complete the project, in which each group had to give a class presentation about the procedures they had followed and how they had overcome the problems and difficulties that cropped up—these included both translation-related problems as well as those related to group dynamics.

Defining the translation brief

Each student had to have a very clear understanding of the translation brief: the client who was sending the translation, the purpose the translation was to be used for, source and target text formats and the corresponding rate which could be charged if a paid job—explaining which would be used and why. This data formed the basis for drawing up a fictitious bill, since this was an unpaid commission.

The target text is always determined by the translation brief, hence the importance of students having a clear idea of what the final product should be. So that students could clarify doubts in the event of need, they were given the email of the person they should contact in the company who had commissioned the work.

Group meetings

As and when requested by the students, the first 20 minutes of class time were set aside to resolve questions related to the project or to discuss doubts and problems they had come across, both with their colleagues as well as with the teacher. Efforts were made to feed these back to the class as a whole.

Tutorial sessions

The teacher set the office hours in which he or she was available to help students resolve any doubts or problems, and also answered questions on line. The tutorials were either individual or group sessions conducted during normal office hours, by appointment or via e-mail. One of the prerequisites was that before seeing the teacher the students themselves should look for ways to resolve doubts, either by consulting with other group members, other groups or specialists etc. In the end the students did not use the tutorial sessions in the teacher’s office, as they preferred to deal with the problems in class as a whole with the other students, immediately after class or by email.

Deadlines

A schedule was agreed when they started the project which included all the deadlines the students had to meet (individual or group). The documents which had to be handed in by given deadlines were as follows, in this order:

• Compilation of parallel texts accompanied by an explanation as to why they were considered important.
• First draft and definitive translations.
• Glossary.
• Style manual.
• Self-evaluation reports (see Appendix 1).
• Report containing comments and observations about how they had resolved the translation problems that cropped up.
• Reports on group dynamics.

For me, an important consideration was for students to know what was expected by each deadline from the outset, given that if they had a clear idea of what they had to do, which documents had to be handed in and how they would be assessed, they were more likely to perform better.

Phase 3. Assessing the project

Project-based translation of authentic documents promotes continuous assessment, and furthermore assesses the learning process rather than the product. With this in mind, all the documents mentioned above had to be handed in to pass the translation project part of the course.

Self-evaluation

The self-evaluation form (see Appendix 1) was one of the documents the students had to hand in, and the objective behind this was for students to reflect on the competences they had acquired as a result of working on the project as well as those that needed to be improved. This, however, was only collected the second year we carried out this experience.

Co-evaluation of group members

Co-evaluation was used throughout the project and, since this was a group project, all the group members needed to evaluate the contributions by their colleagues before assembling the “pieces” of the project. This proved to be hard, as students were disinclined to evaluate fellow students publicly.

Co-evaluation across groups

Once the project was finished, each group revised the part of the final product submitted by another group. This was done anonymously. The objective here was to ensure that the translation met the required standards.

Evaluation by the teacher

The teacher assessed the project and gave feedback on the basis of the group reports. After each deadline, efforts were made to give feedback to the students in the shortest time possible to help them make progress in their learning process. This was done using assessment scales (see example in Appendix 2). This proved to be particularly challenging at the end of the project, given the number of documents which had to be read and commented on.

Final report

At the end of the project the students had to hand in an individual report explaining how they had organised their work, the strategies they had used to solve the translation problems that had cropped up, the documentation used, conflicts within the group, relationship with other groups etc.

4. Results

After the experience was over, I can bear out that students place great value on the opportunity to translate authentic documents because of what this represents in terms of familiarising oneself with the world of professional translation. The following is a breakdown of the negative and positive aspects I was able to confirm after the exercise, seen from the perspective of the students and the teacher.

The negative aspects breakdown as follows:

From the students’ perspective

• Lack of experience working in a team. Some students insist on doing the work on their own, some try to take advantage of the group, while others felt they had worked harder than their fellow students. What needs to be clearly spelled out is that one of the objectives of PBL is working as a group and that the success of each member depends on the success of all the members of the group.
• Excessive workload. Although some students complained of having to work too much during the course, when they finished the project they placed a high value on their efforts with comments along the lines of “you work a lot but you also learn a lot”.
• Minimum effort option. When I began to use PBL, the course programme also included the option of being assessed on a final exam only, and so some students chose this option instead of working on the project. This option was removed from subsequent course programmes in an attempt to minimise the differences in the effort required of students across the two options. Consequently, if they did not work on a project they could not pass the course, and in the case of resits they were assigned various tasks and translations.

From the teacher’s point of view

• Lack of experience in assessing group work. When I began to use a PBL approach I found it difficult to come up with a formula to assess individual and group contributions without being subjective. Subsequently, after researching the question myself, I have been able to define some criteria, such as assessment scales with different levels of achievement, which I use as a guide (see Appendix 3).
• Enormous workload. When I first began using a PBL approach I was of the opinion that the end product had to be of professional quality. This meant that I revised all the work handed in by students on my own, in addition to the corresponding reports. With time, I have been asking for less extensive documentation than at first in an attempt to reduce my workload. I have adopted peer assessment as a method for proofing the final product, and also made it clear to the client from the outset the conditions under which it is sent, i.e. the translation would go through various stages of revision but the teacher would not check every single target text against the original.
• Lack of experience with group dynamics.

Among the positive aspects I would like to mention the following:

From the students’ point of view

• Continual work assessment. Students can see that through continual work assessment they can pass the course as grades are fragmented into many tasks which they need to submit in stages and count towards their average, instead of gambling everything on one activity or one exam) and learn a great deal. In addition, they can see that they do not have to sit a final exam, which they often find intimidating.
• Autonomous individuals. Working autonomously without the teacher, either individually or as a group, produces autonomous individuals who work more efficiently.
• Training for the professional world. They value very highly being able to work on real projects at university which require them to become familiar with going market rates for translations to draw up a bill, or various tasks related to translation (documenting, translating, revising, terminology research, etc.).

From the teacher’s point of view

• Systematising the methods used. Having worked with PBL in different courses and language combinations has clearly improved my work methodology. This has meant that I perform better as a teacher and so do the students.
• Assessment criteria. The more clearly I was able to define the achievement levels and the grades related to these levels the better students performed, as they had a clear idea of the objectives to be achieved. With time I have also been able to make assessment more thorough, objective and meaningful for the student.
• Job market. After having worked with PBL, I have been able to see that students feel better prepared for the job market. This approach allows them to systematise all the stages involved in a real translation commission, ranging from the initial contacts with the client to discuss the type of language that should be used and other information regarding the translation brief, to revising the translation, reflecting on translation techniques and invoicing.
• Learning process. PBL allows the teacher to monitor not only results but also the students’ learning progress.

Based on the results, I have come up with the following recommendations for improvements:

• Create assessment scales for all the tasks, even for those which are not graded, as they can help student perform better.
• Incorporate criteria that ensure continuous self-assessment of the materials produced by the group.
• Define more clearly the guidance students need to work on the project, detailing the steps for each phase of the project.
• Draw up a deadline schedule that guarantees students have a reasonable amount of time to carry out their tasks and that the teacher can give feedback within a short time after work has been handed in.
• Systematise feedback on the work handed in, so that students are aware at all times of the difficulties they have encountered and familiarise themselves with the available resources so that they overcome them.
• To work on a short project before embarking on the main course project, as this would help students to familiarise themselves with this way of working and sharing out tasks.
• To set up on-going collaboration with companies that can introduce students to the job market and an experience which they can include in their CV. This is not always easy, but some companies are attracted by the idea of having some documents translated for free with no commitments in exchange.
• Carry out projects as part of agreements with companies in order to have a group of students in a company carrying out a project within a work placement framework, so that the teacher would not need to follow the whole project step by step, as it would be the company doing so.
• Develop projects in the form of final year undergraduate dissertations. This could be done in groups, and tutorial and assessments could be more general and global, with fewer submissions, and students working more autonomously.

5. Conclusions

The main conclusion that I can draw from translating authentic documents using a PBL approach to training professional scientific-technical translators, is that students perform better and demonstrate greater commitment. They are highly motivated because they deal with real life situations, and it is they who solve problems, plan and manage the learning activities and their project. Furthermore, in project-based work students have to explain and justify their own work to colleagues which leads to greater understanding.

This kind of exercise requires them to incorporate general competences: cooperating, oral communication, written communication skills, planning and organising. In addition, it requires them to draw on specific competences: applying methodological and strategic principles to the translation process, contrasting the language pair and avoiding cross-language interference, working in the job market, researching and applied use of the tools necessary to solve translation problems or translating different text genres.

PBL implies students reflecting on their development throughout the project, the quality of the work handed in and how the members of the group interact. It requires students to think analytically about their own efforts, their progress and what they have achieved. Students are highly motivated because they work closely with the job market.

With this approach, students establish correlations with other fields they have studied (information technology, information science, terminology management, language competence), use ICT, work through the entire translation process and practice skills that they will need to work professionally, such as time management, acting responsibly and conscientiously, taking decisions and working cooperatively in a team.

As regards the teacher’s workload, this approach means dedicating more hours compared to other pedagogical approaches, above all during the planning and feedback phases. However, the teacher does have the satisfaction of getting students to accomplish the course objectives, work autonomously, and, in short, be ready to go out into the job market, which is the main objective of academic training.  I believe this could be a valuable experience for students and it would considerably reduce teachers’ workload if projects formed part of work placements within the degree program or final dissertations carried out in groups.

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Biography

Dr. Anabel Galán-Mañas holds a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies, and is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), where she teaches courses on introduction to translation and technical-scientific translation. Her research areas include translator training, particularly in the area of blended learning, and the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) applied to translation and translator training.

Contact: isabel.galan@uab.cat