Research Into Translation And Training In Arab Academic Institutions PDF Download

Collaborative translation is a group activity in which participants work together to accomplish a single translation task or project (Kiraly 2000). While collaborative translation has grown in importance in community and professional settings over recent years (O'Hagan 2011; Cordingley and Manning 2017) and is currently being employed in many academic settings (Kiraly 2003; Kiraly et al. 2016a; Buysschaert et al. 2017; Kiraly and Massey 2019), its use in Arabic-speaking translator-training environments has thus far been limited, and little emphasis has been put on the issue of social interaction in collaborative translation. Against this background, this thesis reports on the design and implementation of a collaborative translation project at the Department of Translation, Yarmouk University, Jordan. The project involves a simulation of a real translation workplace in the translation course known as TRA 230 (translation from English into Arabic) in the academic year 2017/2018. Drawing on the tenets of social constructivism and using participatory action research and mixed methods in data collection, the research seeks principally to investigate how the instigation of a specifically collaborative teaching and learning environment affects the development of students' teamworking and translation skills. Data on interactions was collected using classroom observation and questionnaires were used to elicit students' attitudes towards the collaborative teaching and learning approach. Analysis of the qualitative data collected through observation show that the participants learned or honed many important transferable skills that they will need in their future careers as translators. Quantitative findings, based on the questionnaire research, were consistent with the qualitative results: participants showed high levels of agreement with positive statements related to the impact of teamwork on the development of both translation and interpersonal skills. The research thus concludes that collaborative translation is a feasible and successful teaching and learning approach in the English-to-Arabic translation classroom.