Professor Atari gave the first presentation which was attended by most faculty members from the English Department on Monday 26th of October from 11:00 to 12:30.
Topic
More Teaching of L2 Text Processing Strategies in Translation.
The pre-translation phase
Training should include:
Train students to utilize their background knowledge to reconstruct the source text’s intended meaning(s).
Apply the proper strategies of top-down and bottom-up text processing.
Utilize all contextual cues namely, cohesive devices, collocation patterns, certain syntactic patterns embedded between the topic and the rheme, lexical repetition, culturally-specific expressions etc.
Recognize the interconnections between one paragraph and another.
Relate the rhetorical functions of paragraphs namely, explaining, arguing, exemplifying, comparing and contrasting, persuading, etc. to the topic, title and subheading.
Sample Population / Subjects
A study conducted on a sample of trainee translators in their last semester of the BA program and a sample of professional translators working as in-house translators at several translating institutions in the UAE.
Findings
Failure to apply the aforementioned reading comprehension strategies.
Awareness of the translator’s role as the facilitator of communication between ST author and TT readers .
Inadequate knowledge of appositive elements.
Failure to use contextual cues which are available in the source text. These are cohesive devices, collocational patterns, embedded non-finite clauses and certain punctuation marks.
Failure to establish the interconnections among paragraphs and their functions.
Recommendation
The well-established model of Translation Competence is the ultimate goal for all translator training at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The translation competence comprises the following sub-competences.
The above constellation of sub-competences should be the benchmark for stating behavioral objectives, writing the relevant and measasahle intended learning outcomes. What is more important though is the professor’s attempt to select and match specific components of the course content with the ILOs and the tool (s) for their assessment.
Outcome
The ILOs and the assessment techniques should be derived from and based on the afore-mentioned sub-competences.
