Future priorities in translator education - the passing and the enduring

Abstract

I learned Chinese and Japanese in the late 1990s when translation on undergraduate programmes was not yet really ‘a thing’. I handed in hand-written essays, diligently looked up Chinese characters in my dog-eared paper dictionary via the radical index in the middle, and still ended up with an electronic dictionary before I graduated.

Fast forward and I have been teaching Chinese and Japanese translation at the University of Leeds since 2017 to final year undergraduate and master’s students and have taught hundreds of students from the UK, EU, China, Japan and elsewhere. I have taught translation theory and applied translation in diverse genres and also used Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), enabling students to work collaboratively on short translation projects with their peers in China, Japan, Canada and Australia (see Ward and Tobias, 2024). This has enabled students to develop key skills to enhance their employability.