Training undergraduate translators: a consciousness-raising approach

This paper describes a consciousness-raising approach to the teaching of second-year undergraduate students in two semester courses. The teacher first explains the translation techniques with sentence examples. The students are then encouraged to translate as many versions as possible so that they may have opportunities to consciously practice different translation techniques in the process of choosing the most suitable version for a given context. By the fourth week, students are given short paragraphs to translate so as to train their capability to take a larger context into consideration. Towards the middle of the semester, students start to identify a source text for a long project. Once the source text for the whole class has been selected, the students then begin to translate the text individually. They then meet their group members for a discussion before presenting their own section in front of the whole class. Finally, after every group has finished the presentation, the students submit their own final versions together with a reflective journal. It is evident that the students’ critical thinking, and their awareness of adopting translation techniques are strengthened by the repeated, explicit practice of the techniques and by the process of working on the long project.