Search

Machine translation, specifically Google Translate is freely available on a number of devices, and is improving in its ability to provide grammatically accurate translations. This development has the potential to provoke a major transformation in the internationalisation process at universities, since students may be, in the future, able to use technology to circumvent traditional language learning processes. While this is a potentially empowering move that may facilitate academic exchange and the diversification of the learner and researcher community at an international level, it is also a potentially problematic issue in two main respects. Firstly, the technology is at present unable to align to the socio-linguistic aspects of university level writing and may be misunderstood as a remedy to lack of writer language proficiency – a role it is not able to fulfil. Secondly, it introduces a new dimension to the production of academic work that may clash with Higher Education policy and, thus, requires legislation, in particular in light issues such as plagiarism and academic misconduct. This paper considers these issues against the background of English as a Global Lingua Franca, and argues two points. First of these is that HEIs need to develop an understanding and code of practice for the use of this technology. Secondly, three strands of potential future research will be presented

The translation of cultural items is a contested area of high difficulty that is prone to problematisation and allegations of impossibility in parts of the literature. Learner psychology suggests that a positive mind set correlates with learner engagement and can also positively affect attainment (Canfora 2013; Ghaye 2011). Thus, pedagogy needs to be supportive (as opposed to problem-oriented) to encourage learners to engage with great challenges, such as the translation of cultural items. Holistic research on translator education, especially focussing on cultural items, is rare (Angelelli and Baer 2016; Gile 2004; Li, Zhang and He 2015), and this risks the use of pedagogical approaches without empirically testing how successful these really are. In that light, the present study undertook an action research project to test how successful a teaching approach informed by social-constructivist pedagogy and collaborative task-based learning is. An 8-session programme was designed and delivered to a cohort of MA Chinese-English Translation and Interpreting students to teach the translation of cultural items. Using a quasi-experimental setup and mixed methods, the study applied the Pedagogical Imperative cycle (Lantolf and Poehner 2014). It related its findings to established translation competence frameworks (Katan 2003; Kelly 2005; PACTE 2011; PICT 2012; Stolze 2015) and the notion of threshold concepts (Meyer and Land 2006a; 2006b). The results indicate that the programme was very well-received and significantly raised the participants’ confidence regarding translating cultural items. However, there was no statistically significant increase in student attainment. The participants would have required more time and practice to become increasingly self-sufficient and versatile. Katan’s and PICT’s competence Level 3 were approached but not consistently achieved. The data further yielded insights into translation choices that can facilitate or undermine the successful trans