Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
2nd INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON ACADEMIC STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY , Balıkesir, Türkiye, 2 - 05 Eylül 2020, ss.71
The ultimate aim of translation education should be to impart adaptable knowledge, skills, and abilities to
translation students that they will operationalize in real-life settings if and when need be; thus, the task of
translation education institutions should not be reduced to that of vocational schools, which can be claimed
to favor ‘practice-intensive training’ over ‘theory-bound education’. However, this proposition does not
annul the fact that practice is an integral component of translation education. Therefore, translation students
should be offered real-world/authentic activities. In this sense, this paper presents a situated-learning project
conducted by the author and 62 first-year undergraduate students enrolled in the course “Basic Research
Techniques” in the Department of English Language and Literature in the 2018-2019 academic year. The
students were asked to visit the restaurants in the City of Çanakkale and identify translated menus in need of
editing. They worked in 14 groups of three to six members. At the end of this two-week project, they were
requested to provide the commissioner with an edited version of the menu and to submit the lecturer a report
on several parameters. For the purpose of this study, the contents of the reports were analyzed in view of
these parameters to foreground the potential implications of such projects on translation students’ developing
and improving translator competence. The preliminary results suggest that the project helped the participating
students raise an awareness that translation is not only the production of a target text based on an assumed
source text but also a process that entails the acquisition and possession of efficacious interpersonal skills for
the satisfactory completion of a translation task.