Courses in LSP 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 is to enhance competence in LSP translation, in a real-life working environment. It is important to stress that the focus of the course is on specialised translation and not on terminology tools.

• LSP translation courses must be planned for at least two (if not four) semesters. Courses should be held regularly – e.g. two hours weekly or four-hour seminars every two weeks. This would depend on the time devoted to them in the host programme – Bachelors (BA), Masters (MA), etc.
• The subject field for the entire LSP translation course – at least for one semester – should ideally be defined in close collaboration with the teacher of the subject field. Since both undergraduate and postgraduate translation studies programmes may be structured differently depending on the institutions or countries offering them, it is worth mentioning that some institutions offer special courses on the most common fields of specialisation for translators – usually economics, law and technology. Such courses are intended for translation students to acquire specialised knowledge in these fields. Working together with the subject-field teacher allows LSP translation teachers to choose texts to be translated that correspond to the contents being covered in the subject field classes. This makes it possible to maintain learning continuity in a specialised field.
• 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 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 creating a termbase is not itself a topic for LSP translation courses, teachers should use an existing one if possible, for example, a termbase containing terminology information for all the languages and subject fields taught in the institution. Such a termbase could be easily created and used for all LSP translation courses if teachers of LSP translation courses work together (see below).
• Alternatively, if a terminology database is not available, teachers can create one before the course starts and give students the possibility of further populating this termbase as a class activity or homework. In this case, the termbase definition (structure and selection of fields) should ideally be the result of collaboration between all teachers of LSP translation and translation tools within the institution, in order to be able to cover the needs of all language combinations. In this way, teachers create a powerful terminological tool that can be constantly used, re-used and at the same time improved by the newly added terminological entries of each translation course.
• In order to expand the termbase according to the selected subject fields, teachers should make background material, such as websites, available to students as a source of terminology. By creating, modifying and editing terminology entries, students not only complete translation-oriented terminology tasks and practise using the tools, but they also contribute to preparing materials for future courses.
• To populate terminology databases there are several possible methods, for example, 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.

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

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