Technology has transformed the field of professional translation; but it has also changed the way teachers teach.
1. Professional context:
Two aspects gain in prominence, namely the development of the Internet and, as a consequence, the phenomenon of relocation and globalization, and the change in the nature of the materials to be translated: from paper to file, from translation to localisation.
2. Working conditions:
The translation team work over the Internet and there are even collaborative tools that are now developed on the model of wikis. The most recent phenomenon, in parallel with the development of social networks is the emergence of crowdsourcing and other practices such as fan subbing, fan dubbing or rom hacking.
3. Contents
The translator is now faced with a wide variety of contents: not only text, but also web pages, software interfaces and more and more multimedia: films, video games, audio sequences, Flash animations etc. The communications strategies are as diverse as the media: web pages or software localisation, subtitling, translation for voice-over, reversioning, game localisation. It also poses interesting linguistic questions: you don’t translate the same way for an oral communication and for a textual communication.
4. Translation tasks
The job of the translation has become more and more technical. It may even include CAP tasks, testing tasks and job management tasks.
5. Educational context
New paradigms have emerged in education: traditionally teachers teach in a face-to-face situation. With the development of ICTs, e-learning and blended learning are more and more used. In the so-called constructivist approach, training is moving away from a prescriptive teacher-centred transmissionist model to one which focuses on learners who construct knowledge (Kiraly 2000, O’Hagan 2008).
While traditional face-to-face educational models stills remains interesting in some domains and in some educational situations, the use of ICT and of e-learning or blended learning models may address the difficulties of the new areas of translation as the localisation of multimedia e-contents, project management or the use of CAT tools.
Examples will be taken from the educational scenarios and from the materials developed in the eCoLoMedia project (http://ecolomedia.uni-saarland.de/fr/projet.html), which aims to develop a curriculum (courses and exercises) to teach multimedia e-contents localisation.
P. Merten, ISTI