‘To study is not to create something but to create oneself’: an ontological turn in translator education and training

ABSTRACT

In academic environments ruled by managerialist philosophies, learning as doing, as outcomes, prevails. This work complicates the equation by taking up learning as becoming. Through the prism of learning metaphors, which apart from construction and transmission have not been fully explored in our discipline, especially the potential of Bildung, we seek to make a case that naming an ontological turn helps us orient our priorities, even if the turn is already with us in translation and interpreting in such attributes and practices as affect, voice, creativity, identity, subjectivity, and self-reflection.

KEYWORDS:

• Transformative learning
• ontology
• knowing
• ‘doing being’
• becoming

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Aldridge describes the ontological turn as embracing both teachers in training and students; we will focus on students due to limits of space.

2. The term self-concept is a dynamic, multidimensional psychological construct, and refers to the attributes people ascribe to themselves, such as self-attribution and self-perception. Here, it refers to a translator’s self-perception of his or her competence and how the translator evaluates himself or herself in terms of various dimensions of translation competence regarding learning.

3. Drawing on Buber, Levinas, Marion and Barnett, Hansen has written on the ‘re-humanization and re-enchantment’ of the ‘human-centered professions’, voices of knowing, skills and systems, person and mystery (what he calls ‘wonder- and phenomenon-led’ voice), one tied to the ontic rather than the skills-led I–It relations, and building a ‘Bildungs-process (Self-Cultivation) where the more existential, ethical, and value-oriented questions and themes could come into play and at risk’ (2010: 166–167).

4. ‘Viewing the classroom as text presupposes an active, meaningful model of reading, and it presupposes that the teacher see the text much the way a teacher-researcher would see data in her research project. For teachers, it shifts the focus from the classroom as a place where teachers teach to the classroom as a place where teachers learn (What is the data teaching us?); and it shifts the focus from the students as learners to the students as teachers (What are they teaching us about their learning?)’ (VanDeWeghe and Reid, 131)

5. We are grateful to an anonymous reader for pointing out the relevance here of recent empirical research by such researchers as Erik Angelone, Silvia Bernardini, Adriano Ferraresi, Hanna Risku to show ‘the premium increasingly placed on adaptive expertise and transferable skills, dispositions and personality attributes in graduate and employer surveys, job ads, competence profiles, [and] interview processes’, as well as ‘4EA cognition models holding sway in the cognitive translatology sub-discipline of Translation Studies.’