Assessing how closely postgraduate translation programmes fit the reality of professional practice: a case study of the Spanish context

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the results of an empirical descriptive and contrastive study designed to assess how closely postgraduate translation programmes fit the reality of professional practice. Focusing on medical translation, the case study analyses the convergences and divergences between the competences that professional medical translators deploy in their work and highlight as being essential and those that students are expected to acquire in postgraduate courses in which medical translation is taught.

Two empirical studies were conducted. The first study focused on a socio-professional perspective: 167 English-to-Spanish medical translators were surveyed to obtain information about their profiles and their opinions on the competences needed for medical translation. The second study focused on an academic perspective: the syllabuses of postgraduate courses in which medical translation is taught in Spain were analysed to determine the competences students are expected to acquire. The results of these two studies, which are analysed, compared and discussed, show that there are a significant number of convergences, but also some divergences, between the university courses and the professional practice. These raise interesting questions which need to be taken into account when designing, planning and improving existing and new postgraduate courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Competences
• gap between the profession and academia
• medical translation
• postgraduate programmes
• professional translators

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although we collected 189 responses, 22 of them were from translators who did not actually translate medical texts from English into Spanish, despite being categorised as working with that language pair in the professional directories and associations which we accessed. These 22 responses were excluded from the analysis in order to avoid distortion of the results.

2. Appendix 1 includes the list of competences used.

3. An extended version of these and other socio-professional traits can be found in Muñoz-Miquel (2016a).

4. For further details on these and other differences between TLBs and TSBs, see Muñoz-Miquel (Forthcoming).

5. Note that the wording of these competences was condensed. The complete wording can be found in Appendix 1.

6. This is due to the fact that the specialised courses, unlike the non-specialised ones, include course units devoted specifically to teaching basic medical concepts.

7. It is important to note that information about the genres covered was obtained only from five out of the eight courses analysed. This result should therefore be treated with caution.

8. A process of recontextualisation and reformulation of specialised terms aimed at making the concepts they designate relevant to and understandable by a lay audience.