Designing and Implementing an Online Seminar in Telecollaboration. Machine Translation and Intercultural Communication (MTIC)

Abstract

Telecollaborative translation activities, apart from allowing trainee translators to connect with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, may help students get used to working in virtual teams, receiving feedback from their peers, discussing translation strategies, and negotiating meaning to achieve the purpose of producing an acceptable translation. Furthermore, by using machine translation and post-editing, students may widen their translanguaging practices and acquire a higher level of intercultural communicative competence, which is a key ability translators should have when mediating between languages and cultures. The MTIC (Machine Translation and Intercultural Communication) course was designed by a Spanish and a British university with all such purposes in mind and as a professional development activity to support student transition to the global market. Based on major theoretical approaches to translator training and translation competence, this action research explains the reasons behind the design of the course, gives arguments for its potential benefits, and provides results regarding the effectiveness of this telecollaboration programme in terms of translation strategy acquisition and intercultural competence development.