https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9244-6576
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ABSTRACT
Research in domains such as cognitive psychology and pedagogy has long postulated and demonstrated the importance of learners’ subjective concepts/theories and their restructuring in the process of conceptual change. These theories tend to be deeply entrenched and are related to various learner characteristics, such as epistemological beliefs, self-efficacy beliefs, or emotions, and are contextually situated. This paper presents the results of a study investigating the initial conceptual knowledge of translation of undergraduate students and the changes it underwent during the course of the first two years of translation/interpreting- and foreign language-related training. The students’ concepts were examined at three stages of their studies using an adapted version of the PACTE questionnaire regarding implicit knowledge about the principles of translation, which revealed a dynamic vs. static approach towards translation. The responses given by 25 students who participated in all three tests have been analysed on a group and individual level with respect to changes in the dynamicness of the students’ concepts. Observations are made concerning the process of conceptual change, also with reference to particular aspects of translation investigated by the questionnaire, and some pedagogical implications regarding how conceptual change can be promoted more effectively are offered.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Prof. Andrzej Łyda for his feedback on the design of the questionnaire, to the reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions regarding the paper, my colleagues who assisted me in collecting the data, and the students who participated in the study.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Marta Chodkiewicz is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Her main research interests are translation competence and its acquisition, the empirical investigation of translation processes, and the optimisation of translator education. She has authored articles on translation pedagogy and empirical research into translation competence and has carried out an extensive longitudinal study into the development of translation competence in novice translators, whose methodology and results are partially discussed in her doctoral dissertation.
Notes
1 It does not necessarily involve steady progress, and a small perturbation in the knowledge system, including one caused by instruction, can have a disproportionately large effect (e.g., Brown & Hammer, Citation2008).
2 In the sense of Göpferich (Citation2010, p. 11), i.e., based on an awareness of the criteria the TT needs to meet in order to be fit for its purpose.
3 The students had taken fewer courses in translation and were not trained using process-based methods, in contrast to the participants of the current study (see Section 5.1).
4 Synthetic models of translation as both equivalence and communication were also found in a study by Kozlova et al. (Citation2016), which sought to investigate the beliefs of Chinese vs. Western students. The study, however, did not deliver firm evidence of cultural differences.
5 See note 2.
6 The first four pairs of statements were found to ‘best reflect differences in the opinions of the subjects participating in the pilot study’ and were the only ones for which the results were analysed extensively by PACTE (Citation2008, p. 112) for the groups of teachers and translation professionals. See PACTE’s Citation2017 publication for more information on how the instrument was designed and validated.
7 I am grateful to Prof. Andrzej Łyda for his suggestion to add this category.
8 The word ‘always’ was put in bold so as to make sure that the participants noticed it when the questionnaire was refined according to the findings in Chodkiewicz’s (Citation2018) pilot study.
9 The classifications are adaptations of PACTE’s (Citation2015) classification of responses to pairs of dynamic and static items as ‘dynamic’, ‘static’, and ‘ambivalent’.
10 See note 9.
11 See note 2.