The collective volume Foreign Language Training in Translation and Interpreting Programmes is a welcome and timely contribution to the field of teaching Languages for Translation and Interpreting Purposes (hereinafter LTIP), a new but increasingly growing branch of research under both Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) and Translation Studies (TS). In this book review, I will first argue why LTIP deserves scholarly attention. Then I will summarise the features of this particular book, detail its content and discuss its limitations.
Why does LTIP deserve attention? Scholars now believe that translators and interpreters are made, not born. As a result, translation and interpreting have been successfully institutionalised as a major in higher education. Curricula have been developed to guarantee acquisition of a series of competencies (Albl-Mikasa 2013; Hurtado Albir 2017; EMT 2017). Among those, the most fundamental one is communicative competence in at least two languages, which refers to both the ability to comprehend (and produce) messages in the working languages and the ability to manage and transfer them cross-culturally both effectively and coherently. It is also the predominant competence expected from translators and interpreters by employers according to Li (2022) and Wang and Li (2020). However, the development of this competence has not always been taken seriously in translation and interpreting curricula. Not infrequently, curriculum developers and faculty members take it for granted that the so-called “bilingual” competence is the prerequisite of admission into translation and interpreting programmes and thus should not be a problem for students. However, this is not the case, as literature on the subject has often claimed (Colina and Angelelli 2016). Teaching LTIP should be taken seriously for two reasons. Firstly, in many contexts translation and interpreting are carried out into both A and B languages (Lim 2003; Wang and Mu 2009), and they are taught to students of diverse backgrounds who may not be fully proficient in their working languages (Arumí Ribas 2012; Li 2001; Setton and Dawrant 2016). Secondly, teaching LTIP is different from teaching languages for general purposes. While the latter favours a communicative approach where fluency is emphasised, the former gives priority to other factors, including variation in register, textual conventions, use of specialised terminology, etc., because professional translators and interpreters, as cross-cultural mediators, are supposed to produce high-quality target texts that are effective in a particular context. LTIP teaching should focus on the specific needs of translators and interpreters in line with market expectations in terms of language competence of these professionals. Therefore, more attention should be given to this seldomly explored but important area of research.
The following features characterise this collective volume. Firstly, it is pioneering in its way of addressing the teaching of LTIP, exploring students’ learning needs and market expectations and using them as the basis for goal formulation, material development, instructional design, and achievement assessment. Next, it addresses LTIP from complementary perspectives. In this regard, it includes articles approaching LTIP from macro perspectives, such as the state of the art of LTIP research and general teaching methodologies. It also consists of chapters addressing LTIP from micro perspectives, such as needs assessment, MOOC course development, and specific instructional designs.
In the opening chapter, Enrique Cerezo Herrero and Astrid Schmidhofer present the state of the art of LTIP research. They analyse why LTIP is an under-researched area and why it deserves attention. By reviewing existing publications on the subject between 1990 and 2020, they provide critical insights on LTIP research: they identify the unique goals of LTIP (equipping students with language tools so that they can develop additional competencies in future translation and interpreting courses and continue to improve by themselves through autonomous learning); they review the various theoretical frameworks that LTIP can rely on (contrastive rhetoric, textual genres, Translation and Interpreting Studies, and communicative teaching methods); they detect the limitations of current materials in terms of teaching approach and purpose (a strong orientation towards the type of common communicative approach prioritised in the teaching of language for general purposes), and they highlight the inadequacies of such an approach for translation and interpreting trainees (e.g., failure to prepare students as professional mediators across languages and cultures). After reviewing the limited existing research on LTIP, they also point out the directions for future efforts. Suggestions include, for example, conducting action research to consolidate the status of LTIP as a branch of LSP and TS; identifying the inadequacies of published textbooks for the of teaching LTIP and filling these voids in the market; exploring effective teaching approaches that encourage autonomous learning; examining in what ways teaching LTIP skills requires a different approach from teaching languages for general purposes; and applying the tenets of current theoretical proposals and the findings of empirical studies into LTIP teaching practice. Though informative, one limitation of this chapter is that, when reviewing contributions around a certain theme, for example, “communicative skills and teaching models”, previous works are cited without synthesising their interactions. The chapter could also be strengthened by organising previous research on interpreting- and translation-specific language training separately because they build on different competence models.
Chapter two is concerned with teaching approaches. Eva Seidl reports on a case study conducted at the University of Graz in Austria. She examines the perceptions of 18 students of German as a second language on the use of a multicompetence-based approach and of translanguaging in teaching LTIP. The results indicate that these methodologies are well received among the students and encourage autonomous and effective learners. The weakness of this chapter is that the validity and reliability of the questionnaire are not justified. Although the author uses descriptive statistics, a verbal narration of frequencies without a visual presentation in pie or bar charts makes it hard to follow.
In chapter three, Melita Koletnik focuses on learning needs assessment. By drawing on the framework of needs-based instructional design in LSP, she discusses the importance of satisfying the learning needs of trainee translators in terms of linguistic competence. She shares experiences in diagnostically testing undergraduate translation students’ competence in English and in aligning the testing results with the goal of formulating learning outcomes and developing or adapting materials at the University of Maribor, Slovenia. The results suggest that the students showed advanced competence in linguistic competence and that bilingual translation is a valuable tool in language teaching. For this chapter, I have a few concerns. If detailed information about the two-group pre-test post-test experimental design were provided, for example, randomisation of the participants, group size and statistical analysis methods, the credibility of this research would be higher. Readers may also want to know more about the differences between the control and experimental group (standard deviation, t statistic, etc.) besides the p values and effect sizes. Since the pre-test scores between the control and experimental group are different, t test is not an appropriate choice for statistical analysis. Instead, ANCOVA using pre-test scores as the covariate should be preferred to remove the impact of the difference in pre-test scores on the difference in post-scores between the two groups.
Like chapter two, chapter four also discusses teaching approaches. Silvia Roiss examines the application of a holistic action-oriented approach to teaching German as a foreign language for translators and interpreters at the University of Salamanca, Spain. As an illustration of the approach taken, she reports on the use of surveys among first-year students, seniors and graduates to elicit information about the students’ expectations, their level of satisfaction, and their assessment of the alignment between training and market needs. She also shares how textbooks are examined to evaluate their coverage of domain-specific and cross-curricular content. Though the conclusions can hardly be generalised to different contexts, the value of this chapter lies in its demonstration of how to use surveys and textbook analysis to better orient the teaching goals, content, and approach towards students’ expectations and towards market needs. My concerns for this chapter are about the qualitative content analysis of the textbooks. If the author explicitly explained the sampling criteria of the textbooks, construct of the analysis framework and coding process (including inter-rater reliability if there were two coders), the research would be more methodologically sound.
Chapter five describes an innovative experience in an LTIP course taught at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. Lupe Romero reports on a pilot study incorporating gender-related learning outcomes into a syllabus for teaching Italian as a foreign language to students of an Italian-Spanish translation course. Data from assessment activities, students’ surveys, and teacher diaries suggest that students’ achievement in relation to the expected gender-related learning outcomes varies and that students’ attitudes towards gender equality affect learning efficiency. Similar to chapter four, adequate descriptions of the qualitative data analysis process are missing.
Online teaching is the focus of chapter six. María Ángeles Recio Ariza addresses the design of a MOOC course for teaching German to translation and interpreting students at the University of Salamanca. The author draws on theories of cognitivist and constructivist approaches to learning, second language acquisition, and TS for this purpose. The target goal is to equip students with the ability to read original texts with translators’ eyes, identify possible problems for cross-cultural communication and solve them appropriately. The value of this chapter is that it proposes an outline of a MOOC course for teaching German to translators and interpreters. Though this chapter is conceptual in nature, without empirical evidence for its effectiveness, it is still premature to judge the quality of the proposed outline.
In chapter seven, Heather Adams discusses the teaching of grammar to students of translation and interpreting. This topic is worth exploring because professional translation and interpreting very often require correct and accurate active use of the B language on the part of practitioners. Through a survey of 54 lecturers teaching LTIP at 16 universities, she concludes that the dominant teaching approach is explaining and reinforcing grammatical skills as they arise in the teaching materials, which reveals a preference for a functional learning approach rather than a theoretical approach. If anything should be improved, it is the methodological section. For a well-planned research design, readers expect to know the sampling criteria, detailed demographic information of the participants and the construct of the survey questionnaire, which are unfortunately missing in this chapter.
Chapter eight presents the use of intra-lingual subtitling as an innovative approach to teaching English to translators and interpreters at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain. Laura Cruz-García describes in detail the instructional design and goal of the experience, which aimed at enhancing the students’ ability to synthesise information and produce coherent and correct target language in a communicative context. Though time-consuming and challenging, evidence indicates that such an approach increases the students’ motivation to learn because it differs from traditional language exercises, contains an element of entertainment, involves the use of technology, and resembles what happens in the translation market.
In the last chapter which is a narrative literature review, Ulrike Oster argues for the necessity of an approach to language competence enhancement that takes into account the specific requirements of interpreting in order to ease the way for students to develop interpreting competence in future interpreting courses. She bases her argument on cognitive concepts (lexical knowledge representation and specific cognitive constraints in the comprehension and production stages in interpreting) and previous studies on interpreter competence. Although her review of specialised literature suggests that deficiencies in interpreting-specific language skills have been detected in trainees, those skills have not received due attention in translation and interpreting curricula. Therefore, she proposes to pay more attention to the development of the specific language skills necessary for a demanding task such as interpreting.
Besides the limitations mentioned above, there are others that drew my attention. The works reviewed are mainly limited to those published in Spain. More attention is given to translation than to interpreting. Some earlier works (e.g., Mackintosh 1991; Korkas and Pavlides 2004) and recent publications (e.g., Díaz-Galaz 2020) are not considered. In terms of formatting, there are a few spelling and capitalisation mistakes. A weakness of the empirical studies in this volume is related to research methodology. For example, the statistical analysis in chapter three and qualitative data analysis in chapter four, as mentioned previously. For LTIP to grow into an established area of research, more robust designs and methodologies need to be developed. Future explorations could explore action research procedures or draw on good practices from other didactic-focused research in neighbouring disciplines.
Despite these limitations, it cannot be denied that, as a sound collection devoted to teaching LTIP, an important branch of research under both TS and LSP, this monograph is a welcome contribution and a valuable reference. Given the contribution of the articles in this volume to LTIP, I recommend it to teachers and scholars interested in this new but increasingly growing branch of research.
Xiangdong Li
Xi’an International Studies University
E-mail: lixiangdong@xisu.edu.cn