Towards a Student-centred Approach to Translation Teaching

The aim of this article is to review the traditional methodologies of teaching translation that concentrate on text-typologies and, as an alternative, to propose an eclectic multi-componential approach that involves a set of interdisciplinary skills with a view to improving the trainee translators' competences and skills. To this end, three approaches, namely a minimalist approach, a pre-transferring adjustment approach and a revision vs. editing approach are proposed to shift the focus of attention from teacher-centred approaches towards student-centred approaches. It has been shown that translator training programmes need to focus on improving the trainee translators' competences and skills, such as training them how to produce and select among the different versions they produce by themselves with justified confidence as quickly as they can (minimalist approach), adjust the original text semantically, syntactically and/or textually in a way that the source text supplely accommodates itself in the linguistic system of the target language (pre-transferring adjustment), and revise and edit others' translations. As the validity of the approach proposed relies partially on instructors' competences and skills in teaching translation, universities, particularly in the Arab world, need to invest in recruiting expert practitioners instead of depending mainly on bilingual teachers to teach translation.