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The author offers an overview of the Interpreting Studies literature on curriculum and assessment. A discussion of curriculum definitions, foundations, and guidelines suggests a framework based upon scientific and humanistic approaches - curriculum as process and as interaction. Language testing concepts are introduced and related to interpreting. By exploring means of integrating valid and reliable assessment into the curriculum, the author breaks new ground in this under-researched area.Case studies of degree examinations provide sample data on pass/fail rates, test criteria, and text selection. A curriculum model is outlined as a practical example of synthesis, flexibility, and streamlining.This volume will appeal to interpretation and translation instructors, program administrators, and language industry professionals seeking a discussion of the theoretical and practical aspects of curriculum and assessment theory. This book also presents a new area of application for curriculum and language testing specialists.

New and unfamiliar situations often create in people a mix of emotions, in which motivation and curiosity coexist with anxiety and a reduced level of self-confidence. Since this phenomenon also occurs in situations in which people are supposed to learn something new, research has started to show interest in the role played by the affective factors in a wide range of cognitive processes. The present study starts from the conviction that translator training is a domain in which such affective variables are particularly relevant, considering the growing demands placed on translators nowadays and, in close connection to that, the pressure experienced by trainees. Therefore, by combining research data with reflective insights drawn from the author’s teaching experience, the paper aims at investigating those elements of the general translator competence that generate the highest levels of anxiety among students enrolled in advanced translation courses.

Legal transactions have permeated every aspect of our life. Much of this is accomplished through legal translators who, by their outputs, impact our personal and professional future. That said, this article seeks to tackle the challenges and opportunities in preparing legal translators for professional practice. The article is a quality review in its nature which adopts the descriptive approach. The interactionist perspective is adopted in this present article to examine the challenges faced by and the opportunities offered to legal translators under training. This examination is placed within the context of the rapidly evolving translation industry and its related interdisciplinary research, which covers the technology and legal translation, quality in legal translation, and training pathways for legal translators. The subjective perspective is acknowledged as the human experience is involved to explain the individual phenomena within broader context of legal translation profession. The article draws that there is a need to make changes in the legal translation status because we need to improve the translator’s perception of their role. Moreover, training models adopted to prepare legal translators have to be updated by revising the outdated practices of legal translation, and integrating the social role to face the new challenges as the translators are the intercultural mediators who facilitate the international legal communication.

The Current European Digital Competence Framework for Lifelong Learning (DigComp 2.2) includes five areas with 21 sub-competences, and most of them are included in the European Master’s in Translation (EMT) 2009-2022 frameworks. Which of these will be included in the curricula depends on the level of the study program (BA or MA) and the needs of the students, who we tend to believe are digital nomads. In the educational context of our study various areas of digital competences (DC) are developed implicitly as part of translation assignments and are not specifically acknowledged and assessed. In this paper we investigate how the students perceive their DC and whether this is connected to the number and type of translation courses taken and their view of themselves as future translators. The data was collected via an online questionnaire. The informants (N=58) assessed 25 statements on a five-point Likert scale, thereby reporting how skilled they believed they were with respect to various digital practices. The data was coded and analysed with the SPSS software package. The statistical tests include descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation, a one-way ANOVA and a two-way ANOVA. The results show that the students have a high perception of their DC, but no significant connection can be established between the pedagogical input and the students’ perception in this regard. The paper ends with the analysis of the pedagogical implications of this finding for teachers and course developers.

The Evolving Curriculum in Interpreter and Translator Education: Stakeholder perspectives and voices examines forces driving curriculum design, implementation and reform in academic programs that prepare interpreters and translators for employment in the public and private sectors.

With the development of medicine, the demand for the translation of medical texts has increased significantly. Translations play an important role in disseminating medical knowledge and new medical discoveries and are vital in the provision of health services to foreigners, tourists, or minorities. Translating medical texts requires a variety of skills. In our study, we assess the extent to which translation and interpretation students at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania are able to translate medical texts from English into their mother tongue (Hungarian) and Romanian (the official language of the country). With the purpose of curriculum development, we examine whether the lack of medical knowledge affects the work of translators and what strategies can be used in translation in the absence of this expertise. We also examine our students’ attitude related to translating medical texts and becoming a medical translator.

When entering the job market, prospective translators face certain difficulties concerning professional know-how that they have to overcome in order to succeed in their career. For this reason, the aim of this article is to provide insights into the main concerns of future translators regarding professional competences. To understand these concerns, a corpus was created using the questions posted by future translators in a forum located on a very well-known translation site: Proz.com. A total of 125 posts were processed and thematically coded using the corpus manager Sketch Engine. The thematic codes were based on two multi-componential models of translator competence: PACTE’s and EMT Board’s models. Once the content was coded, qualitative content analysis was carried out in order to analyse the main concerns of translators-to-be in relation to professional competences. Results show that marketing, industry, and business knowledge are among the main causes of worry of prospective translators. Although the results are not generalisable, the conclusions drawn from this study provide translator trainers with a comprehensive view of what professional competences should be reinforced in the classroom.

Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training is a systematically corrected, enhanced and updated avatar of a book (1995) which is widely used in TI training programmes worldwide and widely quoted in the international Translation Studies community. It provides readers with the conceptual bases required to understand both the principles and recurrent issues and difficulties in professional translation and interpreting, guiding them along from an introduction to fundamental communication issues in translation to a discussion of the usefulness of research about Translation, through discussions of loyalty and fidelity issues, translation and interpreting strategies and tactics and underlying norms, ad hoc knowledge acquisition, sources of errors in translation, TI cognition and language availability. It takes on board recent developments as reflected in the literature and spells out and discusses links between practices and concepts in TI and concepts and theories from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics.

The purpose of this article is to present the results obtained in a study of summative assessment in practical translation modules in translation degree programs in Spain and of the problems that exist in relation to assessment. Part of the EACT project, the study was conducted as a survey, using a specifically designed questionnaire. Its sample comprised 97 translator trainers who, between them, taught a total of 223 practical written translation modules. This article presents the profile of those trainers, the modules they habitually taught and the assessment tasks they used for grading in each module. Among the most common of those tasks are translations of texts, translation projects, students’ commentaries or reports on their own translations, translation error analysis and the analysis of the linguistic, textual and pragmatic characteristics of source texts. The article also identifies some of the main problems and challenges related to assessment in translation teaching, which notably include the subjectivity inherent in any type of assessment, the lack of standardisation of assessment procedures and the heterogeneity of translation students. It concludes by outlining the contribution of the EACT project, a key aspect of which is the design of translation-level tests.