A Case of Situated Learning and its Implications on Development of Translator Competence

The ultimate aim of translation education should be to impart adaptable knowledge, skills, and abilities totranslation students that they will operationalize in real-life settings if and when need be; thus, the task oftranslation education institutions should not be reduced to that of vocational schools, which can be claimedto favor ‘practice-intensive training’ over ‘theory-bound education’. However, this proposition does notannul the fact that practice is an integral component of translation education. Therefore, translation studentsshould be offered real-world/authentic activities. In this sense, this paper presents a situated-learning projectconducted by the author and 62 first-year undergraduate students enrolled in the course “Basic ResearchTechniques” in the Department of English Language and Literature in the 2018-2019 academic year. Thestudents were asked to visit the restaurants in the City of Çanakkale and identify translated menus in need ofediting. They worked in 14 groups of three to six members. At the end of this two-week project, they wererequested to provide the commissioner with an edited version of the menu and to submit the lecturer a reporton several parameters. For the purpose of this study, the contents of the reports were analyzed in view ofthese parameters to foreground the potential implications of such projects on translation students’ developingand improving translator competence. The preliminary results suggest that the project helped the participatingstudents raise an awareness that translation is not only the production of a target text based on an assumedsource text but also a process that entails the acquisition and possession of efficacious interpersonal skills forthe satisfactory completion of a translation task.