Abstract of phd. thesis Jordanian Universities Translation Instructors’ Practices and Students’ Perceptions of these Practices: Towards Guidelines for Improving Translation Pedagogy

Abstract

It is no doubt that language teaching and learning has passed through various phases of ups and downs in a perpetual zeal for finding effective pedagogy for acquiring knowledge.  Some researchers as House (1981) criticize the traditional way of teaching translation and describe it as a frustrating one. She asserts that in such ways of teaching, teachers teach the course by giving a text to students without having an objective of choosing such text. The text is difficult for students to translate due to the fact that the teacher has not trained students to deal with such complex text before. Consequently, students commit errors. In the next session, the class goes through the same text sentence by sentence where every sentence has to be read by a different student. Finally, the instructor asks the class to suggest alternative translation solutions and correct the suggested version. House asserts that this way of teaching translation is a frustrating one. This line of argument brings to the surface one of the salient debates concerning translation pedagogy, namely, the gap created between theory and practice in translation programmes at university.

It follows that there might be a need of new translation pedagogy that might help to improve the translation quality and help learners to take the responsibility of their learning. Further, students are in need to feel motivated in order to achieve progress and promote autonomous learning and self-confidence when learning this skill. Moreover, teachers have to be aware of effective methodologies for teaching translation and training students to be good translators in the future. Thus employing effective pedagogy may promote and improve the quality of translation teaching and learning as well as translation as a product.

Statement of the Problem:

Taking into consideration that translation is a very important skill that is highly related to SL and FL acquisition, there might be an urgent need to investigate the issue of translation pedagogy at the university level. Further, translation studies have been almost all the time focusing on translation as a subject matter, in comparison with translation as a whole pedagogical system. Gonzàlez and Davies (2005) assert that most of the research has been done on translation training focus on describing what happens in translation and disregard what happens in the translation classroom.    For the best of the present researcher’s knowledge, the issue of investigating translation pedagogy at the university level does not receive much attention in the literature at least locally.