A global approach to graduate education and research training

Interpreting and translation are professionally oriented fields and universities usually offer skillbuilding degree programs at Masters level. Research orientations of young researchers fall mostly into the categories of library-based and applied field research supervised by faculty whose involvement with the professional practice of translation and interpreting usually seized at the time of their appointment. Thus, few professors in these domains have the dual qualification of professionals and academic researchers leaving doctoral students to compete for limited resources at a global level. Translators and interpreters are a geographically mobile target group, working as independent contractors wherever international conferences take place. This is the context that produced the initial impetus for creating a virtual doctoral school to cater to a mobile student body in need of sound research training. Additional impetus has come from the changing research landscape in higher education and industry, where large, collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects have largely replaced the individual, small-scale study; how to overhaul traditional structures for research training to successfully meet new challenges has therefore become another important dimension of the project; in addition, ensuring quality in doctoral education together with creating and maintaining a network of highly experienced researchers are two goals that are embedded in the larger objectives of this project. The pilot is staged on a web-based portal already used to offer different degree programs at the Interpreting Department of the University of Geneva. Six individual and collaborative learning activities have been designed to address different dimensions of the research cycle. Project evaluation addresses all three stakeholders - doctoral students, faculty, and designers - and is based on both opinion data and real data retrieved from the learning portal and is designed to provide proof-of-concept for virtual collaborative doctoral research training