A case of situated learning and its implications for the development of translator competence

The task of translation schools should not be reduced to that of vocational schools, which can be claimed to favor ‘practice-intensive training’ over ‘theory-bound education’. However, this proposition does not annul the fact that practice is an integral component of translation education. Therefore, translation students should be offered real-world/authentic activities. In this sense, the present paper presents a situated-learning project conducted by the author and 62 first-year undergraduate students to investigate how a project-based situated learning approach can help translation students develop translator competence with particular focus on social competences. The students were asked to visit the restaurants in the City of Çanakkale, Turkey, and to identify translated menus in need of editing. They worked in 14 groups of three to six members. At the end of this two-week project, they were requested to provide the commissioner with an edited version of the menu and to submit the author a report. The contents of the reports were phenomenologically analyzed in view of Kiraly’s (2013) three social competences – professional etiquette, negotiation, and teamwork – and Eser’s (2015) interpersonal skills. The obtained results suggest that the project helped the participating students raise an awareness that translation is not only the production of a target text based on an assumed source text but also a process that entails acquisition and possession of efficacious interpersonal skills for the satisfactory completion of a translation task and observance of professional codes of behavior as a member of a professional community.