Background

The emergence of the global communications networks-based infrastructure has had a significant impact on the translation industry in the sense that both the needs for translation and the means to meet those needs are being affected.

For example, the fastest growing sector of the translation industry is currently considered to be Web localization (Lockwood, 1999)—an entirely new field that simply did not exist prior to recent Internet/Web developments. As for the new means to meet demand, distributed language services (i.e., teletranslation), have emerged to take advantage of the global networks, providing translation services in distributed mode. As the medium of communication changes, so does the nature of the message.

Translators who localize Web content need to be familiar with the characteristics of this medium in order to be able to adequately understand and convey the intended message. The Web carries information in multimedia and in an interactive manner in real time. As such, the Web presents a challenge to traditional translation, which mainly dealt with text-based asynchronous communication essentially in paper form. In the face of such new changes, the continuing professional education/training of translators who may otherwise be fossilized in traditional media and modus operandi is becoming increasingly important.

The localization industry has been stressing the need for training service providers in response to the needs of the market. The LISA Education Initiative Taskforce (LEIT) represents one clear response to such needs. Similar efforts are being made by the European Commission’s LETRAC (Language Engineering for Translators Curricula) project and the Irish Software Localisation Interest Group's CLP (Certified Localisation Professional) (Esselink, 1999). These aim to bring the industry and educational institutions together in order to close the gap between the theory and the practice of translation and to serve the real needs arising from the communications revolution.

Furthermore, the Net-based communications infrastructure is changing the education sector itself. The virtual university is no longer a concept but is fast being put into practice; in it, students are able to take courses irrespective of their physical location, on the basis of their interest in a given subject. The mode of virtual courses is now beginning to be applied to continuing professional training, as examined in this article. Introduction

One example that addresses the issue of upskilling translators who wish to work in the Internet environment as well as those employed in traditional settings is the totally Webbased Translation Techniques course for English ↔ Chinese and English ↔ Japanese offered by the University of Hawaii at Manoa Outreach College. The course was inaugurated in the Northern Hemisphere spring of 1999. The 11-week course is designed for translators at an “advanced or superior level” and is intended to improve their abilities as regards to:

• Recognizing translation problems and finding solutions;
• Using Web translation skills to transmit translations via the Internet/Web;
• Practicing translation quality control;
• Assessing translation;
• Working as a team and
• Applying professional ethics.

Course supervisor Dr David Ashworth summarizes the course objective by saying: “The Web is becoming the locus for much of the work in translation, and working on the Web involves the cultivation of Web literacy and use of Web resources”. The applicants for the course need to sit screening tests for bi-directional translation for the respective language pair (i.e., English to Chinese and Chinese to English and the same for Japanese). The tests are done online through its Web site and are cleverly designed, with the clock starting as soon as the candidate opens the test page. This requirement also cuts off those who do not have Web access in the Chinese or Japanese language. The staff teaching the course is from the Center for Interpretation and Translation Studies (CITS) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, which also provides attendance-based courses for translation and interpretation in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The unique features of the Web-based courses at Hawaii include: (1) they involve languages with non-ASCII character sets which are normally more challenging for online communications than their ASCII counterparts in terms of electronic transmission and processing; (2) the fee is affordable to most freelance and in-house translators as well as full-time students, and (3) they are truly global, as candidates are accepted on the basis of merit as judged by their passing the screening test, and on the bilingual computer facilities available to them, regardless of physical location.

How do the University of Hawaii's Translation Techniques courses differ from their old counterparts of face-to-face attendance-based and paper- and audio tape-based correspondence courses? What are the real advantages of such online courses? In order to find out, the author decided to sign up for the English-Japanese course herself. This article is therefore based on her first-hand experience as well as interviews with the director of the CITS, Dr. Ashworth (however, the course only started in September and at the time of writing it is still at the early stage).

Global Classroom

The very first course assignment—self-introduction— provided the participants with a taste of the global classroom, as postings came from students located in many different parts of the world, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan, the UK and the US (both the mainland and Hawaii). The students are divided into Chinese and Japanese tracks, although their paths cross from time to time for exercises which use English texts as a common source for both languages.

According to Dr. Ashworth, the participants are mainly aspiring translators and practicing translators who have had little formal training before. He noted the course’s initial success, expressed in terms of a very high continuation rate for a non-credit course. He attributes the reason to the fact that the course is primarily professional training. Proof of the need for this kind of portable, globally accessible course operated entirely on the Web is evident from the growth in enrolment numbers, from initial participation by 11 students to 20 for the current intake, the second installment. It is interesting to note that people accessing the course from Japan expressed their concern about the high telecommunication costs that they may incur during the course as they are required to pay for local calls, unlike in the US and “down under”.

Course Contents

The course assumes that the participants are reasonably Internet-/Web-savvy and able to access suggested resources as well as read/send messages in/to appropriate forums set up in the course's Bulletin Board (BB) system. The course is practically oriented in that participants are set translation tasks to carry out using texts selected from Web resources. In turn, these are peer reviewed according to predetermined criteria. Prior to translation, each participant is required to analyze the source text (by initially paraphrasing it in their native language) in order to identify any particular problems. The selected texts for the purpose of analysis and translation are all up-to-date and topical, ranging from birth certificates to semi-technical writing on clinical depression, Office 2000 related documents and technical writing on genetic engineering. It is obvious that many hours are spent preparing the course materials, both in terms of their selection and arranging them into http format, a fact confirmed by Dr. Ashworth.

Translation tasks are assigned into both participants’ native and non-native languages, although the latter is less in terms of quantity. The homepage for the course provides useful URLs, including online bilingual dictionaries and up-to-date reference materials to improve translation technique. During the course the students are also required to subscribe to a translators’ mailing list through which they are expected to solve some of the translation problems, as appropriate.

In terms of the online and offline time that students need to spend, the tasks themselves are to be carried out offline whereas reading of fellow students’ messages may take place online. Apparently real time chat components were considered, but the time differences of the regions in which students reside made synchronous communication practically impossible, according to Dr. Ashworth. The students need to submit assignments each week via a designated BB on the Web, and the time of submission is automatically recorded.

Student-Instructor Dichotomy

Dr. Ashworth explains that the instructors are there primarily as facilitators and that the teacher/student ratio is no different from the face-to-face counterpart course. However, on the basis of experience gained from the initial course in spring, the current one has been designed to include more interaction among students. This offers a breathing space in the previously excessive workload of the instructors. By the first three weeks into the course the number of messages posted (mainly assignments but including notices from instructors) had exceeded 300. Although not all messages are relevant to all instructors (as some are for Japanese only and others are for Chinese), the quantity is indicative of the considerable time that instructors need to allocate to facilitation. This timeconsuming aspect of dealing with messages in virtual courses is also pointed out by Connel (1999), based on his experience with offering translation courses on the Internet at City University in London. Because practically all interactions are written down, this could make online courses much more onerous from the instructor's perspective than equivalent face-to-face instruction.

In comparison with the traditional extramural course, online courses offer “immediacy of communication in the same sense as electronic mail, with no need to schedule synchronous communication” says Dr. Ashworth. He suggests that the advantages this brings include: (1) the flexible time factor (students can log in at any time convenient for them); (2) students can work at their own pace within reasonable time constraints, and (3) the opportunity to draw on resources such as fellow students from many different locations and mailing lists. I have noticed the great affinity between this kind of global online course and the nature of translation work; this often has no single answer and yet peer consultation, particularly from those who are based in different parts of the world, greatly benefits the quality of the end product. Both in-country and out-of-country translators can contribute productively to bettering the translation.

Conclusions

The LEIT survey has identified the top three skill sets for translators as:

• Proficiency in translation skills and methodologies;
• Awareness of cultural issues;
• Basic word-processing skills.

The top priority is the craft of translation, and this is what the Hawaii courses aim to brush up. As pointed out by Esselink (1999), “a localization vendor who needs to translate medical texts using Trados Translator’s Workbench will always prefer working with a medical translator who has no Trados experience to working with a translator who knows Trados, but has no medical expertise”. Building up translation skills cannot be achieved overnight, despite the advancement of technology.

However, opening up the translation market to global competition will mean that translators cannot afford to be IT-challenged. What is more, their translation skills will come under wider competition from talent all over the world. Under such circumstances, the need for professional continuing training is becoming ever more critical. The Hawaii course is considered to be at a “developmental stage” in Dr. Ashworth’s words. Nevertheless, in terms of optimizing the Web as a medium of delivering training/ education, it demonstrates the advantage of Web-based online instruction for translation providers. These can enroll from time to time in such courses as and when it suits them to upskill and deal with their areas of weakness. The widespread availability of such courses in future can only bring benefits to translation consumers.

This is yet another proof that the communications revolution is creating new demand for translations and also introducing the means to meet such demands. The “plug and learn” mode of training could become the norm in the translation industry in the near future. Connel (1999) of City University suggests that “access to learning systems should be seen not just as a bonus for the conscientious worker, but as an important factor in upskilling and staff training”. Localization companies can schedule staff translators to take such courses, while freelance translators are likely to enroll in them to make their skills more marketable. Dr. Ashworth’s future plans include a course on technical translation, including translation of Web documents.

And now I must return to my next assignment, which was due for submission yesterday. Luckily for me, though, I can still make it thanks to the international dateline falling between New Zealand and Hawaii!

References

Connel, T. (1999). Web support for distance learning in the field of translation, ReCALL 11(2):31–37, found at http:// www.hull.ac.uk/cti/eurocall/recall/rvol11no2.pdf

Esselink, B. (1999). Trained for Tomorrow. Language International 11(4):22–24.

Lockwood, R. (1999). You Snooze, You Lose. Language International 11(4):12–14.

For further details on the University of Hawaii Translation Techniques course, contact Dr David Ashworth at ashworth@hawaii.edu.

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Minako O’Hagan
PhD Candidate
School of Communications and Information Management
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand
e-mail: Minako.OHagan@vuw.ac.nz