Curriculum renewal in translator training: vocational challenges in academic environments with reference to needs and situation analysis and skills transferability from the contemporary experience of Polish translator training culture

This work examines the principles underlying curriculum renewal for the training of translators. It considers recent work from Translation Studies on the nature of translation competence, arguing that a more dynamic understanding of the nature of translation must be reflected in a departure from traditional transmissionist pedagogical practices. Consideration of these issues in a curricular framework must also acknowledge the ideological potential of curricula themselves to prioritise certain relationships between the learner and society, relationships which are investigated from the perspective of a socially situated view of the translator. With regard to determining curricular orientation, a methodology of needs and situation analysis is suggested as a means of profiling essential characteristics of the translator’s work in specific contexts, informed by such issues as changing notions of translation, changing employment norms in the language services sector, locally prevailing norms in the educational environment, etc. Major issues impacting on the situational consideration of needs in translator training are examined, in particular the way in which the vocational / academic dichotomy may problematise training in academic environments. The notion of skills transferability is presented as a theme which is important both to the training of translators and to maximising social reconstructionist potentials in university curricula. In the final chapter, the issues presented in the first three chapters are discussed in relation to the challenges facing translator training in Polish universities with the implementation of Bologna Process reforms. In particular, Polish notions of academic and vocational education are analysed and the experience of one particular university philology is presented as a case study. The conclusion takes the themes discussed in the work and presents them in terms of the opposition between ‘training translators’ and ‘teaching translation.’ Future research trajectories are also proposed.