Training translation teachers in an initial teacher education programme: a self-efficacy beliefs perspective

ABSTRACT

Most of the translation programmes around the world focus more on training professional translators or translation researchers, and less on translation teachers. As a consequence, there is little experience of teacher training available in the discipline of translation studies, even though there is high demand for well-trained translation teachers. In this article, we first present the initial teacher education programme, called the Master of Arts (MA) in Translation Education, that has been running for several years at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China. Then, we report an exploratory study that examines the influences of the programme on pre-service translation teachers in terms of their self-efficacy beliefs in translating, teaching and research. By analysing the interview and the focus group data from the six participants, we found that in general the programme had positive influences on the development of self-efficacy beliefs of the participants, suggesting that the training of translation teachers could be a success when it is conducted in a formal and systematic way. The findings of the study provide some implications regarding the training of, and research on, translation teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation teachers
• self-efficacy beliefs
• initial teacher education
• teacher training
• exploratory study

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Di Wu is a PhD candidate in applied linguistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include translator training, translation teachers’ beliefs and practices, and translation learners’ beliefs.

Lan Wei is a PhD candidate in applied linguistics at the University of Auckland. Her research interests include individual differences in language aptitude and working memory; mechanisms of second language acquisition; and teacher education and development.

Aiping Mo is a professor of translation studies and director of the Center for Translation Studies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. His research interests include translation education, and pragmatics. He has published various articles in prestigious international and Chinese journals, such as Babel, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Modern Foreign Languages, Chinese Translators Journal.

Notes

1 Traditionally, researchers have termed students in initial teacher education programmes as pre-service teachers. Therefore, in this paper, pre-service translation teachers (PTTs) is used to refer to the post-graduate students in the programme.

2 The reason why we chose the final-year PTTs was because, compared to those in their first and the second year, they had a relatively complete experience of the programme.

3 This is a pseudonym to protect the privacy of the professor.

4 To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are currently very few institutions that offer translation teacher training qualifications. Apart from the programme at GDUFS, a programme called Postgraduate Diploma in Translation and Interpreting Pedagogy was offered at Macquarie University, but was cancelled at the end of 2014.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [Grant No. 17BYY056].