Listening to Translation trainees : Voice to text and text to voice tools

The sudden changes in learning and teaching brought about by the outbreak of the pandemic have already sped up some of the technological trends that had already begun to be detected beforehand. During the last few years, common users have been able to embrace the technological development of language processing technologies mostly associated with mobile devices. Mobile phones, smart devices, smart speakers and any other common day-to-day devices have built-in language processing applications with different functions, such as translating, reading digital texts or reproducing oral texts in written form. Translation, interpreting and mediation teachers have noticed how their students have incorporated this type of tools into their learning process. In some cases, this incorporation has contributed to consolidating the concept of augmented translation (O'Brien 2022), while in some others they may only have been employed to achieve specific learning outcomes without having developed the right skills. In this presentation we will pay special attention to the most common speech to text and text to speech tools. We will describe their principles of operation and their possible uses and implications for second language, translation and interpreting training. This approach will allow us to explore in depth to what extent the learning objectives and skills expected to be acquired in second language, translation and interpreting courses should take into account the current technological context