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This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reflects on the present and future of Translation Studies following the incorporation of terms and perspectives from industrial technology discourses and practices into the discipline. It examines the current status of translation technologies training in translation and interpreting curricula in undergraduate degrees in Spain. The book provides a state-of-the-art review of translation competence, translation revision competence and post-editing competence models, analysing their similarities and differences in the light of recent research on revision and PE training. It proposes a pedagogical approach to future-proofing the translation profession in the 2020s.

Since the beginnings of translation studies, applied translation research has set out to address the practices, processes and products of translation in both work and education. The contexts in which these are realized are embedded in broader sociotechnical systems as well as in the specific settings where translation is performed. Although the situated nature of professional translation is uncontroversial and suggests that it should be investigated in situ, workplace-based, organization-oriented research in applied translation studies is a relatively recent and still under-developed phenomenon. The nascent interest in it is partly due to advances in research tools and practices, but mostly to an emerging but still largely implicit transdisciplinary research framework. This article argues that the actual and potential impact of transdisciplinarity should frame translation research more explicitly. It considers how the growing diversification of professional translation and its convergence with other communication professions calls for applied translation studies to adjust to new realities. It explores current developments in professional translation practice, presents a use case of workplace-based research, and concludes with a model of transdisciplinary action research that can serve as a structured framework for investigating and learning from rapidly evolving professional processes and practices in translators’ sociotechnical workplaces.

The present chapter considers how Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, in both its epistemic and ethical dimensions, can usefully inform current thinking about how future translators should be educated, and how their teachers can learn with them – experientially, collaboratively, ethically and co-emergently. We do not live in Aristotle’s world, so it is illusory to imagine we can directly apply his concept of practical wisdom to twenty-first century professional life and learning. However, it can serve as a useful starting point to conceptualize a fundamental aspect of knowledge-building that, for want of being known or adequately categorized, has been largely neglected in the discourse on translator competence and didactics.

While the nature and status of translators' work are changing due to technologisation and other factors, translation is acquiring a strategic function in organisations. The intercultural component of translation competence makes translators well positioned to play a key role in assuring quality in international corporate communications. But quality models envisage only restricted interactions between translators, clients and communications specialists. Moreover, evidence about translators' self-concepts shows them underequipped to adopt the roles that meaningful cooperation with corporate communications suggests. This chapter reports on a pilot study at the interface between translation and corporate communications in Switzerland. Presenting findings from a survey of translation and communications professionals, it reveals underdeveloped feedforward and feedback cultures and a translator self-concept that underplays the mediatory, advisory added value of human translation. Concrete implications for quality assurance and translator education are drawn and future research is outlined.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in [The Interpreter and Translator Trainer] on [09 Oct 2019], available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1750399X.2019.1647821, This special issue is devoted to training translator trainers, a remarkably neglected field of inquiry given the strong interest shown in translation pedagogy since translation studies first emerged as a discipline. The very term ‘trainer’ belies the complexity of roles and demands that these educators have to fulfil, some of which is captured in the range and depth of the articles contained in this issue. The first three contributions span the synergetic potential of practical, research-oriented and pedagogical skills in translator educators’ competence profiles, mismatches between educators’ beliefs and practices, and how learning, teaching and doing research can be combined to enhance self-efficacy beliefs. They are followed by five case studies which describe and investigate teaching practices designed to develop students’ assessment, digital and information literacy as well as their multimodal audiodescription and audiovisual translation skills. By presenting practices that educators might wish to emulate or adapt to their own institutional realities, the contributions to this issue reflect past approaches to educating the educators; but they also represent a decisive first step towards broadening and deepening the sporadic work previously done on what translator educators (should) do, how they (should) teach and how they (should) develop.

Previously published in Translation Spaces 6:1 (2017) According to the International Ergonomics Association, a focus on organizational ergonomics recognizes that people work within socio-technical systems that encompass tools, equipment, and computer interfaces as well as other actors in their professional environment and networks. In recent research, we have started investigating such socio-technical factors from an ergonomic perspective. Observations at professional workplaces, responses to questionnaires, and indepth interviews with translators suggest that their perceived self-determination is more important to the success of socio-technical change than the technological developments themselves. A lack of involvement in decision-making at the workflow level may explain why so many translators have been resistant to taking new technology on board. We discuss how a feedback culture could mitigate many socio-technical issues by giving translators a voice in change and empowering them to contribute to organizational learning and growth.

Machines are learning fast, and human translators must keep pace by learning about, with and from them. Deep learning (DL) and neural machine translation (NMT) are set to change the face of translation and the distributions of primary tasks, with TAUS predicting Fully Automatic Useful Translation (FAUT) by 2030. Although theoretical and practical courses on computer-aided and/or machine translation abound, less attention has been paid to DL and NMT. Although NMT is still at the R&D stage, it shows great promise for relieving human translators of the tedium of repetitive routine work. The challenge for translation education is to give students the knowledge and tool kits to learn when and how to embrace the new technologies, and to exploit how and when the added value of human intuition and creativity can and should be deployed

Encountered at all levels of language, conceptual asymmetries between source and target languages present translators with fundamental challenges that require problem awareness, problem identification and problem solving. A case in point is conceptual metaphor in translation. Versions of conceptual metaphor theory have been applied in various productoriented studies of how translators deal with the challenge of metaphor in translation. However, there is potential in combining product-oriented approaches with techniques used to access translators’ cognitive processes, although process-oriented studies on how conceptual metaphor is re-conceptualised or re-mapped in translation are still rare. Building on an exploratory study carried out at our institute, in which findings from translation process data suggest that experience and/or training appears to be a main factor in handling conceptual metaphor, we present some salient features of re-mapping metaphor. Triangulating data from target-text products, keystroke logs and retrospective verbal commentaries collected under very similar conditions in a laboratory setting, we analyse how translators at different levels of experience handle two complex conceptual metaphors. The results appear to suggest that complex metaphor might indeed be culturespecific. They also potentially indicate that re-mapping practices are a function of experience and that re-mapping to a source-language target domain could create more uncertainty than generic-level re-mapping. Both findings hold pedagogical implications, which are discussed together with some methodological issues.

Despite the fact that professional translation is characterized by human-machine interaction, the ergonomics of the professional translation workplace is relatively under-researched. In order to gain further insights into how translators worldwide have set up and organized their workplaces, an anonymous online survey was developed by a team of researchers in translation studies and occupational therapy as part of an interdisciplinary project. It was made available in six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish) and distributed through multipliers such as professional organizations. The interest that this topic generated in the professional community was reflected not only in the large number of completed questionnaires (1,850) but also by the comments provided by translators both in the survey itself and in email messages to the research team. This paper reports on the findings of the survey with a focus on differences existing among commercial, institutional, and freelance translators in different countries and the degree to which language technology is involved in professional translation. Findings are compared to good practice recommendations for computer work, and conclusions are drawn with respect to health issues related to suboptimal ergonomics. Alors même que la traduction professionnelle se caractérise par une interaction entre l’humain et la machine, l’ergonomie chez les traductrices et traducteurs professionnels reste un domaine relativement peu exploré. Dans le but de recueillir des informations sur la façon dont les traductrices et traducteurs à travers le monde ont agencé et organisé leur poste de travail, des chercheuses en traductologie et en ergothérapie ont réalisé une étude en ligne anonyme dans le cadre d’un projet interdisciplinaire. Traduit en six langues (français, anglais, allemand, italien, portugais et espagnol), le questionnaire relatif à cette étude fut envoyé par des multiplicateurs, par exemple des organisations professionnelles. L’intérêt suscité par la question au sein de la communauté professionnelle se reflète dans le grand nombre de questionnaires complétés (1 850), mais aussi dans les commentaires formulés par les traducteurs dans l’étude elle-même et dans les courriels adressés à l’équipe de chercheuses. Le présent article expose les résultats de l’étude et met l’accent sur les disparités entre traducteurs commerciaux, institutionnels et indépendants dans les différents pays et sur le degré de pénétration de la technologie langagière dans la traduction professionnelle. Les résultats font l’objet d’une comparaison avec les recommandations en matière de bonnes pratiques dans le travail à l’ordinateur et servent de base à l’analyse des problèmes de santé liés à une ergonomie insuffisante.

The parallels between writing research and translation process research range from the objects of study (text producers and texts) to the methods employed in investigating them. Similarly to writing research translation studies has moved over the last two decades from an almost exclusive focus on products towards considering workplace and cognitive processes and the effects of those processes on the quality of products. In this paper we outline how the methods common to both fields can be applied to the investigation of translators’ understanding of their roles and responsibilities as text producers and their treatment of the specific problem of title translation. The data are drawn from a corpus built up in a longitudinal research project about the relationship of translation competence and the translation process. The multi method approach we use combines techniques such as keystroke logging screen recording retrospection and interviews. It allows us to monitor translators at their workplace in as controlled and non invasive a manner as possible. It also provides rich data that make it possible to infer the practices and metalinguistic awareness that characterize the translation competence of translators with different levels of experience.

Information literacy has been implicitly recognized as a key aspect of translation competence in various theoretical models of translation competence (e.g. Göpferich 2008; PACTE 2008; Risku 1998). However, researchers have only recently begun to systematically examine information behaviour in the translation processes of students and professionals to determine how information literacy develops (e.g. White et al. 2008). The questions of how and whether translators use the multitude of electronic and non-electronic resources at their disposal and of how novices and professionals differ in this regard remain to be investigated in detail. The multi-method approach that we use to analyse translation competence and information behaviour combines data from ethnographic observation of the translation situation, surveys and semi-structured interviews to determine self-reported practices, keystroke logging, screenshot recordings of everything that happens on the computer screen, cue-based retrospective verbalizations of recorded translation processes as well as additional techniques such as eye-tracking. This combination of techniques in our approach opens a window onto the mind of translators and releases hidden expert knowledge, allowing inferences to be made about the practices and strategies that guide translation processes, considerations translators might make, and the awareness translators have of what they are doing.

Recent cognitive models present translation competence as an open-ended process encompassing a number of mutually dependent, interacting sub-components, which seems to have resulted in a shift towards process-orientation in translator training and created a favourable climate for introducing social constructivist methods to translator education. This paper considers the emergence of a new translator training paradigm and the challenge it poses for e-learning, which by virtue of the key role played by ICT tools in the translation process is well positioned to become an established, integral part of process-oriented, constructivist translator education., De nouveaux modèles cognitifs représentent la compétence de traduction comme un processus dynamique constitué d’un certain nombre de sous-composants interactifs et interdépendants, ce qui semble avoir entraîné un glissement vers une formation en traduction orientée processus, et avoir créé un climat favorable à l’introduction de méthodes socio-constructivistes dans l’enseignement de la traduction. Cet article examine l’émergence d’un nouveau type de formation en traduction, ainsi que le défi qu’il lance à la formation en ligne, qui – en vertu du rôle clé des outils TIC dans le processus de traduction – est bien placée dans l’enseignement constructiviste de la traduction orientée processus.

This chapter suggests reconceptualising the role of the translator within the context of a translator as an adaptive expert, here understood in terms of creativity and the uniquely human ability to narrate – and proposes a procedure to foster this ability. Narrativity in translation has long been either undervalued or problematized (e.g. Baker, 2006). Yet, if we take as a given that the translation profession is at a crossroads (Katan, 2016; Massey & Ehrensberger-Dow, 2017), due in part to the advances in neural machine translation (NMT), then one way in which the translator may assert their added value is to focus attention on their uniquely human ability to knowingly create meaningful texts. The general thesis developed, is that while machines may successfully translate texts in the sense of copying or transcribing text from one language to another, the creation of texts meaningful for a particular readership in a particular moment is a uniquely homo sapiens or rather, as we shall see, a homo fictus or narrans ability. I will suggest that this ability can be enhanced through learning elements of the structure of narrativity and also through an adoption of the Metamodel (cf. Bandler & Grinder, 1975; Katan & Taibi, 2021) - all of which will help to further distinguish the human from the machine.