Becoming a Tech-savvy Translator and Interpreter in the Digital Age

• A list of resources for tech-savvy translators and interpreters, including forums, wikis, and videos.

ARTICLES

Using corpora in the translation classroom by Helia Vaezian.

During recent years, a large number of studies within the discipline of translation studies have focused on corpora and their applications in translation courses. Such studies mainly look into the kind of information trainee translators can elicit from corpora and the effect of using corpus data on the quality of translations produced. Corpora, however, have a lot more to offer to both translation teachers and translation students. Corpus-based translation classrooms, by their very nature, can offer considerable advantages far beyond what traditional translation courses have to offer. This article elaborates on advantages of using corpora in translation classrooms for teachers and students of translation. It further focuses on translation students’ professional prospects and what corpora have to offer in this regard.

The Applications of Keywords and Collocations to Translation-Studies and Teaching by Dai Guangrong.

This paper investigates the corpora applications to translation studies and teaching. Using the parallel corpus, this paper addresses the role of keywords and collocations in the translation process. The paper will argue that it is very important for the translator(s) to identify the keywords and key collocations in translation studies and teaching. Keywords provide a useful way to characterize a text or a genre which can offer a clear and comprehensive understanding of the original texts. Collocation is a mode of meaning which can help the translator(s) to decide the field and style of word-usage in translation.

How New Technologies Improve Translation Pedagogy by María José Varela Salinas.

This contribution wants to show how new technologies can improve not only the professional standard of our graduates, which includes the acquisition of skills like the use of translation memories, databases, and the Internet as information sources, but also how to use these technologies as a pedagogical tool to achieve crucial skills such as autonomous learner-learning and assessment or collaborative learning and working. In this context, virtual environments become especially important instruments. However, instructors must learn to integrate them adequately into their teaching: it is not enough to put the traditional learning material on a virtual platform for downloading. The great advantages of asynchronicity and the possibility of collaborative learning allow for the development of blended learning models and learner-customized courses. There are also means that help students to control their own learning process.

Teaching Translation of Text Types with MT Error Analysis and Post-MT Editing by Shih Chung-ling, Ph.D. 

This study investigates whether students develop the concept of text types in translation by using machine translation (MT) errors analysis and post-MT editing. Students were asked to analyse lexical-specific and syntactic-level problems in the MT outputs of informative, evocative and expressive text types. After that, they were asked to think, judge and infer the distinctive linguistic features of the three text types in the process of editing the MT errors and recording their reflections. At the end of the project, students were asked to fill out the questionnaires. The result of the questionnaire shows that over half of students agree that MT errors analysis facilitates students’ active mental involvement and makes them learn different lexical-pragmatic categories and syntactic structures across text types. In addition, they acquire the knowledge of the relevance of text types to translation.