Meeting evolution with innovation: an introduction to (re-)profiling T&I education

ABSTRACT

This special issue is made up of nine studies from different countries and regions that deliver important insights on major issues in current language-mediator education and practice. The rapid and accelerating evolution of the language industry and its work market has profound repercussions for the education of future language professionals. Resonating far beyond the various contexts from which they come, the contributions foreground innovative educational approaches and empirical research designed to interface closely with the industry and to address current and future trends in professional practice. The papers collectively offer perspectives on developing future-oriented ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills in students, teachers and working professionals: emotional intelligence, professional identity construction in trainers, the efficacy of micro-learning in online teaching, agentic MT post-/pre-editing, literacy and consultancy skills and roles, and the importance of domain, terminology and technology competence. With research aimed principally at developing and deploying value-adding skills and agency, the authors apply both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methods that shed light on multiple dimensions and epistemologies of educating for new and emerging demands on language professionals.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• human added value
• language industry
• role diversification
• soft skills

This special issue originates from an initiative by the Consortium for Translation Education Research (CTER)¹ and the TER (Translator – Education - Research) platform, set up to explore pedagogical contexts, promote better understanding of education processes and strengthen cooperation between members of the academic community from various university backgrounds. TER is a two-year project (2022–2023) funded by Jagiellonian University in Kraków, which focuses on original translation research and methodological innovation. These also broadly correspond to the objectives of CTER and its Third Congress, which was organised as an international online conference in March 2022 under the title ‘(Re-)Profiling translation pedagogy: translators, interpreters and educators’.² Endorsed by the European Society for Translation Studies (EST), the conference took place under the joint auspices of Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland), ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland) and the University of Łódź (Poland). The articles come partly from papers delivered at the conference and partly from proposals submitted in response to a separate call.

In choosing the title of this issue, the guest editors have been guided by the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘evolution’, ‘7.a. A process of gradual change occurring in a system, institution, subject, artefact, product, etc., esp. from a simpler to a more complex or advanced state’,³ and ‘innovation’, ‘1.a. The action of innovating; the introduction of novelties; the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms’.⁴ The nine contributions which appear here present empirical studies that demonstrate how, by degrees, innovation can inform and impel evolution. Their perspectives are truly international in scope, drawing on studies conducted in China, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom. They foreground educational approaches and empirical research designed to interface closely with the evolving language industry and to embrace current and future trends in professional practices. The contributions present interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field research that sheds light on multiple dimensions and epistemologies of educating for new and emerging demands on translators, interpreters and other language mediators.

Given the inevitably limited space available to any special issue, the selection of papers published here presents only a modest sample of high-quality studies from the vast and expanding field of research into language-mediator education. They can do no more than convey a partial snapshot of the many rich and diverse approaches to language-mediator education as it evolves, through innovation, to meet the ever more complex demands that the language industry places on those who work in and for it.

It has become something of a truism to say that the pace of developments in professional language mediation has been exceedingly fast. Over the past two decades, the language industry in general, and its core translation/localisation and interpreting professions in particular, have undergone substantial change, and sharp growth, as a result of unprecedented social, economic and technological developments worldwide. Globalisation, demographic change, increased socio-economic and educational mobility, as well as socio-ethical requirements to provide inclusive access to information, have joined with the precipitous advance of AI-based digital communication and language-mediation technologies to fuel a steep rise in demand for language services. The economic corollary of globalisation has been the emergence of a technology-driven global industry of largely outsourced processes offering time-saving and cost-effective language services (DePalma 2021). The technologies not only enhance productivity, they are also driving an expanding range of services offered in telecollaboration with partners operating in remote locations. But quite apart from the evolution of what was essentially an artisanal economy to an industry-scale digitalised platform economy (Bielsa 2021, 6; Piróth and Baker 2021), globalisation can be said to be influencing the way language mediation itself is approached, understood and conceptualised, revealing a remarkable ‘diversity of forms and types of translation, as well as its widespread significance in different social domains’ (Bielsa 2021, 4).

In terms of growth, current projections by Nimdzi (Hickey 2023) estimate the language industry in 2022 to be worth USD 64.5 billion, rising to USD 69.3 billion in 2023. Despite a troubled global economic climate, Nimdzi predicts a strong 7.0% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), meaning that the market should reach USD 90.8 billion by 2027. Slator (2023, 6), which counts only interlingual language services, presents a slightly more conservative though still positive outlook. It estimates an addressable market of USD 27.9 billion in 2022 – an increase in market size of 4.77% over 2021 – with North America, Asia and Europe as the fastest growing markets. Slator’s (2023, 130–131) base scenario for overall market growth to 2027 is 3.76% CAGR, reaching USD 34.74 billion, while its optimistic one is closer to Nimdzi’s, at 6.83% CAGR – with a predicted market size of USD 41.48 billion by the end of 2027.

The sustained health of the industry appears to be reflected in employment figures. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2022) projects employment of translators and interpreters to grow by 20% from 2021 to 2031, which is much faster than the 5% average for all occupations in the US economy. Building on the 10% year-on-year growth claimed in 2018 (DePalma 2021, 6), the Translators Association of China (TAC 2022) reports no fewer than 5.8 million practitioners working in the country’s language services, including 980,000 full-time translators and interpreters. The macro-economic data point to respectable growth in Europe, too, despite the sizeable dent in last year’s euphoric expectations of 10% (ELIS Research 2023, 12).

In lockstep with an expanding market, the range and types of content that language services providers (LSPs) are handling have also been broadening as buyer intentions continue to diversify (Slator 2022, 15–17) and as LSPs attempt to position themselves as strategic business partners (Hickey and Agulló García 2021). The effect has been a concurrent evolution of the tasks, roles and responsibilities undertaken by the linguists at the industry’s heart. Over the years, the prototypical interlingual translator and interpreter profiles have been progressively extended to include software and media localisers, post-editors, transcreators, intercultural mediators, re-speakers, audio-describers and other accessible communication specialists, plain-text designers, multilingual content creators, terminologists, language consultants and so on – not to mention the many project, terminology, quality and language-data management positions that are so key to LSP production processes, and which are also frequently occupied by graduates of translation, interpreting and multilingual communication programmes. Slator (2020, 15–17) counted some 700 different job titles in the language industry, 100 more than the precursor study two years before (Bond 2018), as the industry has in the last few years moved beyond the core activities of interlingual translation, localisation and interpreting to embrace more upstream and downstream services, such as multilingual content creation and management, language-data curation, accessibility provision and compliance (Slator 2022, 18–19; Massey, Huertas-Barros, and Katan 2023, 3). The work being done is now so varied that the industry itself increasingly prefers to speak of ‘linguists’, which is today used as an umbrella term, to narrower traditional titles, such as translator, localiser or interpreter (e.g. Hickey 2023; ELIS Research 2023; Slator 2023).

In order to operate competently and effectively in constantly changing work settings and modes, the industry’s linguists, together with the professionals that support their services, need to display a widening range of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills, with a marked upvaluing of the latter. For example, the last two iterations of the European Master’s in Translation (EMT) competence framework (EMT Board 2022) and a recent model of post-editing competence (Nitzke and Hansen-Schirra 2021, 69–79) not only stress the need for MT-oriented technological skills and increased domain-specific knowledge, but also show a more marked recognition of ‘soft’ transferable skill-sets – personal, interpersonal and service-provision skills, critical thinking, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, adaptivity – than previous competence models have allowed for. This appears at once to match employability requirements reflected in results from graduate and employer data (e.g. Angelone 2023; Bernardini, Ferraresi, and Petrovic 2022; Hao and Pym 2021; Risku et al. 2022) and to begin addressing the adaptive expertise inherently needed to perform a diversifying range of language-industry tasks, roles and responsibilities (Angelone 2023).

There is an obvious connection between the sharpening focus on transferable, adaptive, (inter-)personal service-provision skills and the added value that human intervention can bring to increasingly automated production processes, especially given the evident and continual quality gains of neural MT and generative AI output. The issue becomes more acute in view of a widening income (and wage) dispersion between the largest companies in the top quarter or so of the language services market able to leverage large-scale automation and the SMEs and independent language professionals subject to mounting pricing pressure (ELIS Research 2023; Pym and Torres Simón 2021; Ubalde and Alarcón 2020). It feeds into a recent ongoing debate about (re-)positioning human language mediators to maximise their value-adding potential, and educating them to do so (e.g. Massey and Ehrensberger-Dow 2017). While some stress the importance of core linguistic and domain-specific expertise in profession practice and education (e.g. Faes and Massey forthcoming; Schmitt 2019; Slator 2022; Faes and Massey, forthcoming) in conjunction with requisite digital literacy and technological skills, others place more premium on adaptability, creativity, multimodal literacy and audience design (e.g. Katan and Fina forthcoming; Morón 2023; Romero-Fresco 2021; Vine and Huertas-Barros 2023) as hitherto prototypical concepts of language mediation expand and mutate to meet diverse communicative needs.

Self-evidently, the quickening evolution of the language industry and its work market, which some suggest is more akin to a revolution (e.g. Allain 2021; Schmitt 2019), has profound repercussions for the education of future language professionals. Educators and their institutions must address current issues and anticipate future demands for students, trainers and employers alike if they are to empower graduates to develop and deploy key value-adding skills and agency. The innovative research and practices collected together here put forward ways of doing just that.

The first two contributions in this special issue present different aspects of ‘soft’ skills development. J. C. Penet and Maria Fernandez-Parra consider the key but often neglected question of emotional intelligence in translator education and practice. They explore whether Trait Emotional Intelligence (EI) theory can be usefully introduced into the curriculum by investigating the extent to which it helped students at two UK universities develop coping strategies as they worked in simulated translation bureaus. Shan Chen and Yanhong Liu move the spotlight from the students to those who educate them, looking at trainers’ construction of professional identity in the context of three Chinese universities. Identifying five key identity themes among the four participants, the reseachers conclude that identity provides valuable access to the way the trainers conceptualise their work, which in this study is demonstrably a factor of the technological advances, educational reform and sociocultural contexts to which the teachers have been exposed. They close by calling for increased professional development as trainers’ roles and expected competences multiply, and for significantly more educational research on trainers, and not just their students.

Specifically addressing the challenges of the machine translation (MT) age, Senem Öner Bulut and Nilüfer Alimen investigate how to re-position human translators and educators by presenting the results of a collaborative learning experiment in MT post-editing, pre-editing and error annotation. They show how students developed task-specific self-efficacy beliefs and heightened awareness of their self-concept as value-adding human agents and future experts at the human-machine interface, with concomitant didactic and praxis-oriented learning effects on their educators, too.

Switching to new roles and prospects offered by the MT age, Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, Alice Delorme Benites and Caroline Lehr explore the need for MT literacy (i.e. understanding the basics, risks and benefits of the technology) and how translators and their trainers can meet it. Proceeding from survey results that indicate MT is much more widely used in professional contexts than previously assumed, though with relatively little reflection, they discuss how future and working translation professionals can be trained to act as consultants to mitigate the risks of uninformed use, thereby not only enhancing translators’ professional self-concept, but also contributing to more general AI literacy in society at large.

Silvia Montero-Martínez’s paper focuses on the language industry’s growing need for terminology specialists. She presents and discusses a Master’s degree curriculum developed at the University of Granada in Spain, with outcomes adapted from the EMT competence framework (EMT Board 2022), to train highly qualified corporate and institutional terminologists who are not only able to meet the current demands of the market, but who also have all the necessary competences to commit to autonomous life-long learning.

In the next article, Mar Díaz-Millón, Irene Rivera-Trigueros and Juncal Gutiérrez-Artacho explore video-based micro-learning as a didactic solution to be implemented in online translator and interpreter education scenarios, focusing in particular on the work mode-related issue of student satisfaction. This is followed by a contribution in which Qinran Dang, Lan Li and Ke Zhao examine industrial and educational perspectives on transdisciplinarity in domain competence through the prism of translation-related job ads, curricula for Master’s translation and interpreting programmes and interviews with teachers-cum-translators.

In response to the technologisation of professional translation and the ensuing need to implement translation technologies in translator education courses, Roser Sánchez-Castany’s paper delves into the problem of the relatively low level of integration of translation technologies into translation modules at Spanish BA-level educational institutions. In doing so, she reveals the factors that underly the problem as reported by a cohort of translation trainers from this setting. In the concluding paper of this special issue, by Olga Mastela and Krzysztof Łoboda, the authors share the results of a pilot study conducted with Polish MA students who assess the use of MT for rendering culture-bound texts.

If educational institutions are to successfully fulfil their mandate, their teaching must reflect the dynamic developments in the industry and market, preparing their students to function efficaciously in the multiple roles and contexts of contemporary and future job markets, while seamlessly achieving their abiding academic objectives. The authors writing in this special issue have set out to meet that challenge, presenting research that illuminates central issues in current training and practice, and that resonates well beyond the contexts in which they work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See http://cter.edu.pl/en/5547–2/ (accessed June 12, 2023).

2. See http://cter.edu.pl/en/third-cter-congress-2022/ (accessed June 12, 2023).

3. ‘evolution, n’.. OED Online. March 2023. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/65447 (accessed June 12, 2023).

4. ‘innovation, n’.. OED Online. March 2023. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/96311 (accessed June 12, 2023).