Integrating technologies in translation teaching: a study on trainers’ perceptions

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the language industry has undergone a technological revolution, and professionals are increasingly required to have strong technological knowledge and expertise. Undergraduate translation programmes have tried to adapt to these changing market demands, albeit at a much slower pace. However, there still seems to be a significant gap between the increasingly challenging technological demands of the translation market and training in translation technologies (TT) in university degree courses. A previous empirical study investigating the presence of technology in undergraduate translation module syllabi showed that there is little integration of TT into translation modules. This paper presents a follow-up study, the primary goal of which is to comprehensively describe this situation with the testimonies of a cohort of translation trainers in Spanish higher-education institutions at undergraduate level. We expect to contribute to the field by reporting on the challenges experienced by trainers who are trying to integrate technologies into their practical translation modules. Findings show that there is little integration of TT into the teaching methodology of translation modules. This is due, in most cases, to factors that are beyond trainers’ control.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation training
• translation technologies
• trainers’ perceptions
• challenges in training technologies
• undergraduate degrees

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are due to Dr Anabel Borja and Dr Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez for their suggestions and constant support, as well as to the anonymous peer reviewers and editors of this special issue for their insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon request. In addition, the appendices of this paper are freely available in Repositori UJI at http://hdl.handle.net/10234/197959.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1750399X.2023.2237330

Notes

1. For the purpose of this study, the concept and definition of TT is based on O’Brien and Rodríguez Vázquez’s (2019, 264) proposal: ‘In its broadest sense translation technology is understood to include a large array of computer tools that help translators do their jobs, including word processors; spell, style and grammar checkers; the World Wide Web; corpus compilation and analysis tools; terminology management tools; translation memory tools (TM); translation management systems (TMS); and machine translation (MT)’.

2. Available at: https://planderecuperacion.gob.es/como-acceder-a-los-fondos/pertes/perte-nueva-economia-de-la-lengua. Last accessed: 26 May 2022.

3. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/info/translating-europe_en. Last accessed: 26 May 2022.

4. This study was approved by Universitat Jaume I Research Ethics Committee, with the file number CD/20/2022.

5. The predefined blocks and topics used as primary guidance during the interviews are available in Appendix 2..

6. A list of the software used by the interviewees and the frequency of appearance in the transcripts can be found in Appendix 3..

7. Known as Memsource until September 2022. https://phrase.com/. Last accessed: 20 January 2023.

8. The verbatim quotes from the interviews included in this paper are translations of the originals into Spanish, which can be found in Appendix 4.

9. For the purposes of this study, the classification of the fields of specialisation proposed by Sánchez-Castany (2022, 34) will be used.

10. Regarding job positions, it is highly challenging to find equivalences between countries. Therefore, to avoid misunderstandings, and for the purposes of this sample description, we will refer to the Spanish university job positions of the participants as follows: ‘associate lecturer’ for ‘asociado’; ‘lecturer’ for ‘ayudante/contratado doctor’; and ‘senior lecturer’ for ‘titular’.