Guided Inquiry and Project-Based Learning in the field of specialised translation: a description of two learning experiences

Abstract

In recent years, university offices for learning and teaching have encouraged their teaching staff to innovate and become teachers as well as to adapt assessment methods to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The need to adjust the learning-teaching process to the EHEA has indeed prevented us from further postponing a discussion that has been acknowledged as necessary for years: why are our students failing to learn as they should or as we would like them to? As teachers, we usually put the blame on our students and neglect the fact that we might be using the wrong approach. In this article, we present the design of two learning experiences implemented in two specialised translation courses taught in the fourth year of the Degree in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vigo, in Spain, and we discuss the implementation of constructivism-based tasks and techniques in the classroom. Particularly, we focus on Guided Inquiry (GI) in the Business Translation course and on Project-Based Learning (PBL) and peer review in the Scientific and Technical Translation course. The work closes with a discussion of the main results, in terms of both students' performances and their reactions to the new learning experiences.

Keywords:

• constructivism
• Guided Inquiry
• Project-Based Learning
• translation competence
• translator education

Notes on contributors

Marta García González holds a Ph D in Translation and Interpreting and by the University of Vigo as well as an M. A. in Foreign. MA in Foreign Trade by the University of Vigo. She was a professional translator from 1997 to 2010, specialising in legal and business translation. Since 2001, she has been a lecturer of legal and business translation at the Faculty of Philology and Translation of the University of Vigo, where she was the Director of the faculty's MA in Multimedia Translation of that university from 2010 and 2012. Currently, she is a member of the Academic Commission of the Master in Multimedia Translation and of the PhD Program in Communication. She is a member of the GETLT research group and her main research interests are legal and business translation, translation pedagogy, translation from and into minorised languages, and screen translation.

María Teresa Veiga Díaz holds a Ph D in Translation and Interpreting and by the University of Vigo as well as an M. A. in Foreign. She worked as a professional translator from 1997 to 2011, mainly in the field of scientific translation. Since 2003 she has been a lecturer of scientific translation at the Faculty of Philology and Translation of the University of Vigo. In 2012, she became the Director of the MA in Multimedia Translation. She is a member of the GETLT research group and her research interests include scientific translation, translation pedagogy, and multimedia translation and minorised languages.