Acquisition of Generic Competencies Through Project Simulation in Translation Studies

Motivated by the research in several international and interdisciplinary initiatives, for example, P21 Partnership for 21st Century Learning or the Collegiate Learning Assessment instruments, we seek for a scalable and measureable set of generic competencies for translation studies. Up to now, the acquisition of competencies in translation studies has primarily been operationalized by implementing authentic projects in higher education classes using socio-constructivist approaches. This results in a hybridization of subject-specific competencies and generic competencies in translator education. Because of the necessity to focus on the acquisition of generic competencies as a primary learnin…

Syntactic Variance and Priming Effects in Translation

The present work investigates the relationship between syntactic variation and priming in translation. It is based on the claim that languages share a common cognitive network of neural activity. When the source and target languages are solicited in a translation context, this shared network can lead to facilitation effects, so-called priming effects. We suggest that priming is a default setting in translation, a special case of language use where source and target languages are constantly co-activated. Such priming effects are not restricted to lexical elements, but do also occur on the syntactic level. We tested these hypotheses with translation data from the TPR database, more specifical…

Predictive Turn in Translation Studies: Review and Prospects

Training the modern translator – the acquisition of digital competencies through blended learning

This paper presents the ERASMUS+ DigiLing project, which aims to teach and improve linguists’ and translators’ skills and knowledge of digitalisation to prepare them for today’s job market. Against this background, it discusses the development of digital competencies and distinguishes them from traditional domain-specific and general competencies. For the purpose of competence acquisition, six online courses have been created which all revolve around the field of ‘digital linguistics’, including localization in the digital age and post-editing machine translation. We provide an overview of the project, the course contents and the didactic methodology. In addition, we discuss which competenc…

Comparing Translation and Post-editing: An Annotation Schema for Activity Units

The current chapter introduces an annotation schema of TPR data that categorises post-editing behaviour into five different classes and compares general-language and domain-specific English-to-German translation and post-editing with respect to production times, key-logging (text production activity and text elimination activity) and eye-tracking data (total reading times on source text and on target text). The results support the hypothesis that post-editing is faster than translation from scratch for both domain-specific and non-domain-specific text types. When key-logging and eye-tracking data are taken into consideration, domain-specific texts require more effort when translating from s…

Eye-tracking revision processes of translation students and professional translators

Great effort has been made to define and to measure revision competence in translation. However, combined eye tracking and keylogging have hardly been applied in revision research. We believe it is...

An Intralingual Parallel Corpus of Translations into German Easy Language (Geasy Corpus): What Sentence Alignments Can Tell Us About Translation Strategies in Intralingual Translation

Parallel corpora are traditionally interlingual and contain source and target texts in different languages. However, intralingual translations into Easy Language (EL) become more and more common in various countries. First intralingual corpora have been built up and investigated in terms of linguistic and structural features, but a translation-driven corpus linguistic approach is still missing to empirically describe the strategies of Easy Language translation, the characteristics of translated texts as well as to make these parallel corpora usable for professionalising and automatising translation processes. In this paper, we introduce an intralingual parallel corpus of translations into G…