Undergraduate Translator Education in Chile—an Inquiry into Teacher and Student Thinking, Learning Experiences and Teaching Practices

Current scholarship in translation pedagogy calls for a paradigm shift towards a learner-centered and socio-constructivist approach to translator education. This view is founded on translating as a socially situated act of intercultural communication anchored in socio-cognitive abilities, and translation learning as multi-componential and sequential. Instruction in translation is thus seen to benefit from process- rather than product-oriented teaching and a focus on learners' textual and discursive competence. In spite of significant progress over the last decade the empirical basis of translation teaching theory and methods remains scant. A lack of attention to the "human factor" in translator education research (students and educators, in favor of processes, content and activities) is particularly conspicuous (Kelly 2008). As the field of translation pedagogy consolidates with ever more refined frameworks that pull teaching designs away from teacher- and text-centered classes to become more learner and learning/teaching-based, little is known about the nature of translation pedagogy ‘on the ground’ in diverse locations of the globe: by whom and how is translation taught, under what constraints, and to what effects. This qualitative study is grounded in second language (L2) teacher cognition research (e.g. Borg 2006, Phipps and Borg 2009), representations of translation as 'inquiry' (Sakai 2010, Cronin 2000, 2003, Venuti 2016) and recent socio-constructivist and sequenced and process-focused translation teaching approaches (Kiraly 2000, Colina 2003, 2015, Hurtado Albir 1999, González Davies 2004, Kelly 2005). From these frameworks, it examines the professional biographies, knowledge base, beliefs and practices of Chilean translation instructors at three different universities, as well as the views and experiences of approximately 50 of these instructors' students regarding their understanding and experiences of translation and instruction in the classroom. Additionally, in order to contribute to the developing 'rapprochement' between translation studies and second language education, findings on the strengths and challenges of undergraduate translation pedagogy derived from these two studies are discussed in a third article in light of the contributions from socio-culturally-oriented L2 education research, particularly multiliteracies approaches to FL teaching (Kern 2000, Byrnes 2005, 2006, Maxim 2009, Kramsch 2011, 2006, Paesani et al. 2015, Swaffar and Arens 2005).Release after 28-Aug-201