Translation Courses

Teachers as well as students should be familiar with principles and methods of  project management.  They should make sure that they know the contents of the eCoLoTrain project management courses Project Management I – Project Management Basics  as well as generell  ICT Skills .

The main learning objective of these courses should be to enhance competence in translation, in a real-life working environment. It is important to stress that the focus of the course is on  translation  not on project management.

• Translation courses must be planned for at least two or four semesters. Courses should be held regularly - e.g. two hours per week – or in seminars – for example, four-hour seminars every two weeks. This would depend on the  time dedicated to them in the relevant study courses – Bachelors (BA), Masters (MA), etc.
• Teachers should bear in mind that aside from preparing course content (texts, background materials, etc.), they must also consider  technical issues , such as preparing/maintaining the material to be used or defining user rights and user IDs for the use of the necessary software by students – this is, however, usually done by system administrators or CAT tool specialists.
• Since creating a database is not subject of translation courses, teachers should use an existing one if possible, e.g. a sample  relationaldatabase  with customer and project data used for teaching purposes by all translation teachers in the institution. Such a termbase can easily be created with the cooperation of all translation teachers and then be populated when used in translation classes.
• If raw materials are not available, the  eCoLoRe Training Kits  can be successfully used for this purpose.

In the ideal case, a PC lab equipped with enough computers for all students and an Internet connection, a word processor, spreadsheet software CD-ROM dictionaries, etc. Otherwise, a classroom with at least one PC equipped with an Internet connection, a word processor, spreadsheet software, CD-ROM dictionaries, etc.

In this scenario, the teacher will play the role of an imaginary client and will present the material to be translated as an assignment with a deadline to be respected. The students' tasks are to:

• analyse the client's request (perform a word or line count, prepare a calculation that takes into account all the resources needed, set time lines for the different project tasks, etc.) (for more information see eCoLoTrain PM Course I, Project Processes).
• make a bid based on the collected data (word/line count, prices, etc.)
• enter the client and project data into an existing database
• prepare the material for translation (creating a folder structure, copy and rename original files, etc.) These tasks can be performed as per PM exercises II and IV of the eCoLoTrain PM Module.

Continue