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RESUMEN: En este artículo, se parte de la hipótesis de que la elección de variantes terminológicas en textos fuente especializados a veces tiene una motivación cognitiva y que esta motivación se refleja en la elección de equivalentes en los textos meta. A partir de un estudio piloto, presentaremos una metodología para comparar las variantes terminológicas motivadas cognitivamente en los textos fuente y sus traducciones. El corpus de este estudio piloto se compone de tres textos fuente en gallego y sus traducciones al inglés; estos textos son artículos científicos que abordan los efectos económicos de los desastres ambientales en la pesca. Primero se realizó un estudio cuantitativo en el que se comparó el número de términos únicos en cada texto fuente con el número de traducciones únicas de estos términos. Luego, cada combinación única de un término fuente y su equivalente se sometió a un análisis cualitativo. Se asignó de forma manual un valor con el fin de calificar la «distancia cognitiva» entre el término fuente y su traducción. Por último, con base en estos valores y la frecuencia del par de traducción en cada texto paralelo, calculamos el «índice de variación interlingüística» (IVI). Las diferencias en los resultados entre los textos paralelos están vinculadas con factores extralingüísticos relacionados con los procesos de traducción. ABSTRACT: In this article, it is assumed that the choice of terminological variants in specialized source texts is sometimes cognitively motivated and that this motivation is reflected in the choice of equivalents in the target texts. On the basis of a pilot study, we will present a method for comparing the cognitively motivated terminological variants in source texts and their translations. The corpus in the pilot study is composed of three Galician source texts and their English translations. The texts are scientific articles addressing the economic effects of environmental disasters on fisheries. A quantitative study was first carried out in which the number of unique terms in each source text was compared to the number of unique translations of these terms. Next, each unique combination of a source term and its translation equivalent was subjected to a qualitative analysis. A value was manually assigned in order to qualify the «cognitive distance» between the source term and its translation. Based on these values and the frequency of the translation pair in each bitext, we computed the «interlingual variation index» (IVI). Differences in results between the bitexts are linked to extra-linguistic factors related to the translation processes. RÉSUMÉ: Dans le présent article, nous soutenons l’hypothèse selon laquelle le choix des variantes terminologiques dans les textes sources est parfois motivé sur le plan cognitif et que cette motivation est reproduite dans le choix des équivalents dans les textes cibles. À partir d’une étude pilote, nous présentons une méthode pour comparer les variantes terminologiques cognitivement motivées dans les textes sources et leurs traductions. Le corpus est constitué de trois articles scientifiques portant sur les conséquences économiques des catastrophes naturelles sur la pêche, écrits originairement en galicien et traduits ensuite en anglais. Nous avons d’abord comparé quantitativement le nombre de termes uniques dans chaque texte avec le nombre de traductions uniques de ces termes. Nous avons ensuite entrepris une analyse qualitative de chaque paire terme source-terme équivalent, dans laquelle nous avons caractérisé la distance cognitive entre ces deux termes à l’aide d’une valeur numérique. À partir de ces valeurs et de la fréquence des paires de traduction dans chaque bitexte, nous avons calculé l’index de variation interlangue (IVI) de chaque texte. Finalement, nous avons mis en relation les différents résultats entre les bitextes avec des facteurs extralinguistiques concernant le processus de traduction.

The present survey-based study aimed at investigating the principles of social constructivist education in undergraduate translator training programs in Iran. To this aim, a needs assessment was conducted to identify market demands and students’ needs for three constructivist principles of authenticity, collaboration and scaffolding. Translation instructors, as the third group of stakeholders, were further surveyed about their teaching approach in terms of the three categories. To find out whether current translation education in Iran reflects market demands and students’ needs with respect to the mentioned constructivist concepts, the results of the surveys were then compared. Upon data analysis, it became evident that scaffolding, indicating students as responsible learners and teachers providing adequate support for the formers’ learning, was the most important principle for the first two groups of participants. Scaffolding was similarly described by translation instructors as the most common principle in their teaching approach. On the other hand, while professional translators and students consider authenticity as the second most important principle, it was profoundly lacking in the teaching approach university instructors take. Therefore, the results suggest that there is a big gap between the current and the desired situation in Iranian undergraduate translator training programs for the principle of “authenticity”, i.e. working on real translation projects with students taking various roles reflecting the real professional translation practice. The demographic information elicited from the surveys also provided evidence for this lacking connection between academia and professional translation practice in Iran.

In this article, the first results of a large-scale survey on the use of technological bridging instruments in contexts of multilingual service provision will be presented. We will focus on answers given by respondents working as public service interpreters and translators, abbreviated as PSITs (N=188). No restriction was set on specific domains of public service in this study (e.g. education, health, etc.). The article focuses on the question how forms of prior training of PSITs relate to the frequency of use of technological tools in their professional practice, such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) technology, machine translation (MT) systems, Instant Messaging (IM) technology, video conferencing technology (VC), termbase management systems (TB), and combinations thereof. En este artículo, presentaremos los resultados preliminares de un estudio a gran escala sobre el uso de instrumentos tecnológicos utilizados para facilitar la comunicación para la provisión de servicios en entornos multilingües. Nos centraremos en las respuestas proporcionadas por sujetos que trabajan como traductores e intérpretes en los servicios públicos (PSITs, por sus siglas en inglés, N=188). No se realizó ninguna distinción entre los distintos dominios de los servicios públicos para este estudio (por ejemplo, educación, salud, etc.) Pretendemos averiguar la influencia del tipo de formación que los traductores e intérpretes han recibido sobre el uso de herramientas tecnológicas, como traducción asistida por ordenador, traducción automática, mensajería instantánea, videoconferencia y programas de gestión terminológica.

The aim of the present article is to show how the holistic approach of a “simulated translation bureau” (STB), bringing together many technological skills that would otherwise be taught separately in isolated course units, succeeds in familiarising translation students with the new ways of working and with new technologies.

International audience

In this paper, we will present the preliminary results of an educational innovation project in which we assess the use of virtual meeting technologies in higher education programmes of interpreting and translation, more specifically the master programmes of interpreting and translation at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). One of the research objectives of the current project is to test the possibilities of virtual conference tools supporting situated learning activities, i. e. learning activities simulating the conditions of the professional reality in a learner-, situation- and experience-based environment. Our second research objective is to assess the usability of virtual conference tools as pedagogical tools to support translation and interpreting classes that are based on the premises of socio-constructivist teaching. The research is carried out in the context of two different courses which were supported by a virtual conference tool: in particular an interpreting workshop and a group feedback session in a translation workshop. ispartof: Trans-kom vol:11 issue:2 pages:220-237 status: Published online

In recent years, much attention has been devoted to professionalisation in translator education. As a result, many different pedagogical activities have been proposed, focusing on the question of how students can acquire professional skills during their studies. This chapter will focus on one such pedagogical activity, i.e. the organisation of Simulated Translation Bureaus (STBs), in which students work on translation projects obtained from real (or fictitious) clients. The aim of the activity is to imitate as best as possible the tasks that translators face in real translation projects. In this chapter, the authors will argue that collaboration between STBs through virtual networks can increase the degree of authenticity in simulated translation workflows. In the first part of this chapter, consideration will be bestowed upon the underlying reasons for the implementation of STBs in translation curricula. In the second part, possibilities for collaboration in the context of INSTB will be discussed.

International audience

The work presented in this chapter is part of a research study that focused on how terms and equivalents recorded in multilingual terminological databases can be extended with terminological variants and their translations retrieved from English source texts and French and Dutch target texts (Kerremans 2014). For this purpose, a novel type of translation resource is proposed, resulting from a method for identifying terminological variants and their translations in texts. In many terminology approaches, terminological variants within and across languages are identified on the basis of semantic and/or linguistic criteria (Carreño Cruz 2008; Fernández-Silva et al. 2008). Contrary to such approaches, three perspectives of analysis were combined in Kerremans (2014) in order to build up the translation resource comprised of terminological variants and their translations. The first perspective is the semantic perspective, which means that units of specialised knowledge – or units of understanding (Temmerman 2000) –form the starting point for the analysis of term variation in the English source texts. The second perspective of analysis is the textual perspective, which implies that terminological variants pointing to a particular unit of understanding in a text are identified on the basis of their ‘co-referential ties’. In the third perspective of analysis, which is the contrastive perspective, the French and Dutch translations of the English terms are extracted from the target texts. This approach is motivated by the fact that translators need to acquire a profound insight into the unit of understanding expressed in a source text before they can decide which equivalent to choose in the target language. In the framework of text linguistics, it has been shown how this can be achieved through the analysis of texts. A translator analyses the unit of understanding based on how it is expressed in the source texts (i.e. the semantic perspective), how its meaning is developed through the use of cohesive ties (i.e. the textual perspective) and how it can be rendered into the target language (i.e. the contrastive perspective). In this chapter, we shall only focus on how co-referential analysis was applied to the analysis of terminological variants in the source texts, resulting in lexical chains. These are “cohesive ties sharing the same referent, lexically rather than grammatically expressed” (Rogers 2007: 17). The terminological variants in these chains – which in this study were limited to only single word nouns or nominal expressions – become part of a general cluster of variants that were encountered in a collection of source texts. Several semi-automated modules were created in order to reduce the manual effort in the analysis of co-referential chains while ensuring consistency and completeness in the data. We will explain how the semi-automatic modules work and how these contribute to the development of the envisaged translation resource (cf. supra). We will also discuss what results can be derived from a co-referentialanalysis of terms and how these results can be used to quantitatively and qualitatively compare term variation between source and target texts.