Courses in General Language Translation

Teachers as well as students should be familiar with principles and methods of terminology and terminology management. They should make sure that they know the contents of all eCoLoTrain terminology courses.

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

• General translation courses must be planned for at least two or four semesters. Courses should be held regularly – e.g. two hours per week. 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 the terminology database to be used or defining user rights and user IDs for the use of databases by students – this is, however, usually done by system administrators or CAT tool specialists.
• Since in general translation courses the variety of text types and subject fields that can be addressed is so wide, using an existing database will depend on the teachers' objectives. If it is possible to use an existing database – e.g. from previous courses –, teachers do not have to create a new one. If there is no database available, teachers should create one before the beginning of the course.
• When preparing a database, general translation teachers can carry out, for example, systematic research and collection of known lexical difficulties, idiomatic phrases, collocations, etc., for the language combination and type of texts that will be used. They can also populate databases, for example, by performing terminology extraction with terminology extraction tools (from parallel texts for bi- or multilingual terminologies), or using machine translation systems (e.g. Systran) to produce bilingual terminology which can be afterwards post-edited and checked.
• Depending on the course objectives, teachers can compile a database that contains linguistically-oriented data categories with the collected information.
• This database will accompany the course and will be maintained by the teacher. Students would be able to access it for the preparation of their translations, but should be encouraged to maintain their own databases, in order to collect their own vocabulary or store vocabulary reflecting their own difficulties.
• Towards the end of the course, the teacher can merge into his/her database those students’ databases entries he/she considers appropriate.

To learn more about variations of general language translation courses integrating terminology management according to available technology

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