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New market realities in the translation industry and elsewhere require an innovative approach to the content of higher education and a refocus on soft and hard skills. A prospective translator shall possess communicative skills, be capable of critical thinking, self-management, teamwork, engage in project activities, as well be creative, intellectually flexible, and digitally literate.New trends in the profession are conducive to revising educational strategies for graduation papers (GP) written by undergraduates. GPs are still theory-oriented, thus failing to meet the pragmatic needs of the translation industry, and lack correlation with hands-on professional activities. Bachelor GPs seem especially challenging, since neither Russian education authorities, nor academic instructors have a clear-cut vision of the bachelor's degree training and its specific nature. Most often, the bachelor’s degree is deemed as a simplified version of the specialist’s degree.The professional standard and the Federal State Educational Standard on Linguistics provide that graduates shall have general cultural, general professional, and professional competences (PCs). If mastered, these competences will qualify graduates for independent professional activities outside the academic institution. This paper presents feasibility study results for practice-oriented GPs. These results are analyzed to see if such GPs match relevant translation problems and if a new practice-oriented method can be used as a tool to assess graduates’ professional aptitude for independent translation activities. The authors discourse upon effectiveness of this tool in education based on LUNN case study. The selection scope covers GPs written in 2015–2020, their number exceeding 200.

Against the background of increasing L2 writing strategy research from a sociocultural paradigm in recent years, writing scholarship has been focusing on L2 learners' writing strategies in various writing tasks. Undergraduate students' graduation paper in the Chinese context, however, has yet to receive sufficient attention. Informed by Activity Theory framework (Engeström, 1987, 1999), this paper adopted a case study design and investigated a Chinese undergraduate student's writing strategies in the graduation paper writing activity. Drawing on interviews with the student and the advisor, the student's paper, and supplementary documents (e.g., paper guidelines), this study showed that the student utilized artefact, rule, community, and role mediated strategies to complete the writing task. Contradictions within and beyond the activity system also existed, which constrained the successful mediation of some of the writing strategies and posed challenges to the student's writing activity. Implications for research and pedagogy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]