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The present paper functions as an introduction to this special issue of mediAzioni, which brings together selected papers presented at the Translating Europe Workshop entitled "L'intelligenza artificiale per la traduzione verso una nuova progettazione didattica?" (3 December 2021), focusing on the pedagogical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a particular emphasis on Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The article revolves around three main themes. First, it considers the impact of emerging neural technologies on language services, redefining the traditional role of the translator and creating new responsibilities and tasks. Despite the considerable progress that NMT has made compared to previous models, it still has shortcomings that are almost "invisible" because they often lack clear grammatical or morphosyntactic marking. Such errors require a certain cognitive effort to identify, since they involve problems that are less obvious to the untrained eye, such as textuality or inadequacies at the level of discourse. Secondly, the article looks more closely at professional practices, especially those related to pre-editing, post-editing and proofreading. Particular emphasis is placed on the indispensable role of the human in translation workflows that integrate NMT not only at the level of post-editing and text revision, but also at the level of translation project management. Finally, the paper moves on to the implications of NMT for the training of translators and beyond, discussing key insights from the workshop participants regarding future teaching practices at university level. The article concludes by outlining the structure of this special issue and providing a brief synopsis of the collected papers.

The use of English to teach academic subjects at university level has been on the increase in the past years, attracting considerable research attention. Among the most pressing issues is that of the language competences required to teach and learn through English. Accordingly, EMI studies have investigated, among other topics, the use of language in the classroom, focusing on the features of lecturers’ spoken production in English. Although the use of English is assumed in EMI, insights into classroom practices indicate that lecturers and students engage in translanguaging between English and other languages. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether lecturers pursue a language policy in class, why they confine themselves to English and when they exploit their multilingual resources, allowing or even prompting students to do the same. Drawing data from interviews with thirty EMI lecturers from five European countries (Croatia, Denmark, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands), the lecturers’ implicit or explicit language policies will be investigated, inquiring into the motives for the adoption of an English-only approach or the flexible use of other languages. Subsequently, classroom discourse practices will be examined focusing on translanguaging in order to verify whether reported language policies and practices correspond to observable behaviour. The data for the study of language use in class is taken from the TAEC Corpus, consisting of thirty transcribed EMI lectures collected within the five countries under study. We will discuss the complexity of the rationale behind English-only language choices and pluralistic language use, arguing that multilingual-oriented EMI policies should not be normed top-down but emerge from communication needs in the classroom.

Comments on “English-medium Instruction Teacher Training Courses in Europe” by Francesca Costa

Comment on "English-medium Instruction and the Role of Language Mediation" by Claudio Bendazzoli

This paper deals with the use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in technical and scientific lectures held by Italian native lecturers. The focus is on formulaic nominal constructions, such as any questions?, elliptical and full questions, such as got it? and did you understand up to this point?, and discourse markers, such as okay? which are resources that may help lecturers to verify and ensure understanding. These structures will be examined quantitatively and, in the case of discourse markers, a qualitative analysis will follow aiming at verifying whether these forms are actually used to check comprehension or whether other functions can be noticed. The productions of Italian lecturers are compared to those of native English-speaking professors in order to better identify the specificities of EMI classroom discourse.