A Social Constructivist Approach

to Translator Education
Empowerment from Theory to Practice

Don Kiraly

I~ ~~o~~~~n~~~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2000 by St. Jerome Publishing
Published 2014 by Routledge
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© Don Kiraly 2000
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Notices
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ISBN 13: 978-1-900650-33-5 (pbk)
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Library of Congress Catalging-in-Publication Data
Kiraly, Donald c., 1953A social constructivist approach to translator education: empowerment
from theory to practice / Don Kiraly.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-900650-32-0 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-900650-33-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Translators, Training of. 2. Translating and interpreting--Study
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Contents
Acknowledgements

vi

List of Figures

vii

1.

2.

3.

4.

Translation and Translator Education: Fields in Flux
Introduction
A constructivism for translation studies
Towards a comprehensive teaching method: approach, design
and procedures
Sources of inspiration
From translation competence to translator competence
Rethinking Approaches to Translator Education
From constructivism to empowerment
Educational dilemmas: from transmission to transformation
Conventional translation skills instruction: the logical
consequence of transmissionist educational views
Professional competence: expertise and professionalism
Implications for teaching: reflective action in a
community of knowledge builders
Summary

1
1

4
5
6
10

15
18
20
23
26
32
33

Key Principles of Social-constructivist Education
Multiple realities and multiple perspectives
Collaborative/co-operative learning
Appropriation
The zone of proximal development
Situating learning: active involvement in authentic,
experiential learning
Viability
Scaffolding
Socio-cognitive apprenticeship
Transformation and the acquisition of translator competence

34
34
36

On Instruction and Construction in the Classroom
Traditional course types: in the service of transmissionist design
Nord's practice-oriented method
A constructivist critique of Nord's method
The constructivist workshop: a forum for learner empowerment

51
51
54
57
62

38
40
42

44
45

47
49

Constructivist initiation and authentic practice
Summary
5.

Initiation through Dialogue
Initiation into the professional dialogue
Translation studies seminars
Conclusion

6.

Authentic Experience and Learning in
a Translation Exercise Class
Introduction
Planning and implementing the case study class
Findings
Implications

7.

8.

9.

Knowledge Construction and the Translator's
Workstation
Electronic tools and the translator
Creating a constructivist computer-based classroom
Conclusion: Instruction today preparing for the work of tomorrow

69
69
75
75
99
100

101
101
102
107
116

123

123
125
139

Assessment and the Emergence of Translator
Competence
The objectivist underpinnings of traditional assessment practices
The limits of traditional testing procedures
Principles of constructivist assessment
A role for professional standards: the example of DIN 2345
Implications of professional standards for assessment
Applying constructivist principles and professional standards
A note on translation quality evaluation
Conclusion

140
140
141
142
147
151
152
158
162

From Dead Bodies and Talking Heads to Holistic
Second Language Acquisition in the Classroom
Language acquisition - A holistic enterprise
Initial steps towards a constructivist second language classroom
Communicative competence and communicative language teaching
A naturalistic method
Implications for translator education: why learning is not enough
Case studies in classroom second language acquisition
Conclusion

164
173
178
179
181
185
192

164

A Conclusion ... and a Beginning

193

References

197

Index

205

Acknowledgements
I could not have written this book without the help of my sponsors, my family, my
colleagues, my students, and my own teachers. First, the University of Mainz and
the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft provided me with grants to carry out the classroom research. Professor Renate von Bardeleben, my department head at the School
of Applied Linguistics of the University of Mainz, provided me with generous counsel, encouragement and freedom to pursue a line of research that is often at odds
with standard pedagogical practice. The greatest debt lowe is to my wife Christa
and my children Yann and Jessica, who gave me so much time to work on this
project - time we would otherwise have enjoyed together. My sister Anne read and
critiqued large portions of the manuscript, and my brother Bill provided his graphic
design acumen to help me create the charts. So many colleagues have contributed
their perspectives and encouragement to the dialogue that has resulted in this book
that I could not possibly name them all. lowe special thanks to Anthony Pym for
his invaluable comments on the first draft, to Laura Russell, who read and critiqued
every page, to Paul Kussmaul and Hans Honig for their collegial support and encouragement. David Sawyer, Judith Leng Lawrence and Diane deTerra made it
possible for me to spend the most prolific months of this project at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies. Their enthusiasm for my approach and their incisive constructive criticism helped me draw together many loose threads and finally
finish the book. The many students who have attended my classes over the years at
the University of Mainz have also been key partners in the dialogue that has culminated in this volume. And finally, I would like to thank Sandra Savignon, who is the
epitome of a constructivist, empowering teacher, and who has been my role model
in the classroom for the past 20 years. This monograph is dedicated to her.
I of course assume full responsibility for all deficiencies, inadequacies and
omISSIOns.
Don Kiraly
March 2000

List of Figures
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure

1: A cognitive processing model of translation
2. Typical interaction in a translation exercise classroom
3: Dimensions of development toward translator competence
4: Maximizing authenticity in the translation exercise class
5: A collaborative framework for project workshops
6: Progression of expertise and autonomy
7: Sample Assessment sheet for student workshops
8: A Needs Assessment for Basic Computer Skills
9: Excerpts from a mid-year second-grade assessment (Germany)
10: Excerpt from a translator's diploma
11: An example of a collaborative semester test

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1.

Translation and Translator Education
Fields in Flux

Introduction
In recent years, it has become a commonplace in educational psychology that knowledge is constructed by learners, rather than being simply transmitted to them by
their teachers. The implications of this viewpoint for the educational process are
revolutionary, because it shifts the traditional focus of authority, responsibility and
control in the educational process away from the teacher and towards the learner.
Attaining competence in a professional domain means acquiring the expertise and
thus the authority to make professional decisions; assuming responsibility for one's
actions; and achieving autonomy to follow a path of lifelong learning. This is empowerment.
Many different ways of looking at the knowledge-construction process have been
proposed, some of them more cognitive, focusing on what goes on in one person's
mind, and others more social, seeing knowledge construction as a collaborative,
interpersonal activity. From an information-processing perspective, for example,
knowledge construction is viewed essentially as an individual, cognitive process:
What is needed to comprehend a text is not solely contained in the linguistic
and logical information coded in that text. Rather, comprehension involves
the construction of meaning: The text is a preliminary blueprint for constructing
an understanding. The information contained in the text must be combined
with information outside of the text, including most prominently the prior
knowledge of the learner, to form a complete and adequate representation of
the text's meaning. (Spiro et al. 1992:64)

This cognitive psychology approach, focused on what is allegedly going on in
the individual's mind, has been the focus of a considerable amount of attention in
translation studies over the past ten years, particularly in work based on thinkaloud experimental methods, as in Krings (1986, 1992), Lörscher (1991), Hönig
(1990), Jääskeläinen and Tirkkonen-Condit (1991) and Kiraly (1995). While working on the research that culminated in Pathways to Translation, I was drawn, at
least partially, into the mindset of the cognitivist approach to translation studies
that was emerging in the mid-1980s. Then, as now, I depicted translation in terms
of a double bind: as an internal, cognitive process and as an external, social phenomenon. Yet, in analysing the think-aloud protocols produced by novice and
expert translators while they performed translation tasks, I was working under the
implicit assumption that by having subjects verbalize what they were thinking
while translating, it would be possible to identify cognitive strategies as if they

2

Donald Kiraly

were fixed routines, artefacts of the mind that could be extracted, dissected and
perhaps even distributed to translators-in-training.
Since completing that earlier work, my understanding has evolved to a point
where I see this cognitive science approach to translation processes as epistemologically incompatible with a social process perspective. The former rests on the
assumption that meaning and knowledge are products of the individual mind –
replicable, transferable, independent of social interaction and essentially static –
while the latter assumes that they are dynamic intersubjective processes.
A critique of my own earlier depiction of mental translation processes (see

Figure 1: A cognitive processing model of translation

A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education

3

figure 1) will perhaps best explain my shift in perspective away from a cognitivist
view and toward a social constructivist one.
Underlying this model is essentially an information-processing view of the mind.
Information of different types is seen to be 'stored' in long-term memory and outside resources. The translator is depicted as an independent cognizing agent who
'retrieves' data from various sources as needed and as a function of his or her translation strategies, which are conceived as blueprints or plans for cognitive action to
solve problems. The black boxes inside the translator's mind – both of which are
depicted as receptacles – are respectively portrayed as the conscious and unconscious sites of information processing. The uncontrolled processing centre is an
essentially unconscious workplace in the mind where intuitions bounce through the
receptacle containing retrieved information; it intuitively produces tentative translation elements and identifies translation problems that are then processed strategically
and more consciously in the controlled processing centre. The translator's selfconcept is shown as a cloud hovering in the background of intuitive and cognitive
activity. This self-concept is the psychological identity that the translator creates
through learning and experience with translation activities, the individual's understanding of him- or herself as a translational information processor.
From such a perspective, the translator's knowledge and strategies could be seen
as existing apart from actual translational interaction. Moving logically from this
image of the underlying cognitive processes involved in translation, it is but a small
and tempting step to use this concept to justify a transmissionist approach to the
teaching of knowledge and skills. In addition to teaching comparative syntax and
encouraging rote memorisation of pairs of bilingual lexical items and idiomatic expressions, we could also justify the teaching of the 'right' strategies. Teachers could
retain their traditional function of transferring knowledge, expanded to include the
procedural knowledge of how to produce correct translations. From this perspective, it should be unnecessary to implicate learners in the actual give-and-take of
multi-faceted negotiation that characterizes translation as a social process. There is
nothing in the model that reflects my current belief that the development of true
expertise can only be developed on the basis of authentic situated action, the collaborative construction of knowledge, and personal experience.
I first became uncomfortable with the cognitivist approach when I confronted
my finding in Pathways to Translation that intuitions (which I defined as nonstrategic, relatively uncontrolled, and virtually untraceable mental processes)
appeared to be deeply and inextricably involved in the mental processes I was trying to observe. Intuitions do not fit neatly into a 'scientific' cognitivist perspective
precisely because, buried as they seem to be in the dark recesses of the mind's black
box, they leave nothing but the most ephemeral traces of their links to more conscious, strategic processes. We cannot readily identify their origins, we cannot
predict under what circumstances they will emerge, and we cannot 'teach' them.
From a social constructivist perspective, intuitions are dynamically constructed

4

Donald Kiraly

impressions distilled from countless occurrences of action and interaction with the
world and from the myriad dialogues that we engage in as we go about life in the
various communities of which we are members. By communicating and negotiating
with peers and more experienced (and thus more knowledgeable) others, we acquire a feel for correctness, appropriateness and accuracy, a feel that is grounded in
our social experiences, and bound up in the language we use and share with other
people. This is the place where the present volume departs from the path I took in
Pathways to Translation. Rather than taking a new fork in the road, I have retraced
my steps, moving back to the position derived from my early experiences with language teaching (to be discussed in Chapter 9), and the acknowledgement that, as
knowledge is intersubjectively constructed, learning must be socially situated.

A constructivism for translation studies
From a social constructivist perspective, individuals have no choice but to create or
construct meanings and knowledge through participation in the interpersonal, intersubjective interaction that the philosopher Richard Rorty has called the “conversation
of mankind” (Rorty 1979). While our personal meanings and understandings of the
world can never be identical to those of any other individual due to the idiosyncratic
nature of experience, language serves as a common denominator of interpretation
that makes it possible for communication to take place at all. As children become
acculturated, they acquire and use language to make sense of the world through the
sociolinguistic glasses of the communities they are in the process of joining. Subsequent learning can thus be seen as a type of re-acculturation, as a process of becoming
increasingly proficient at thinking, acting and communicating in ways that are
shared by the particular knowledge communities of which we are striving to become members.
The implications of these epistemological premises for the translator education
classroom are far-reaching. They include the need for a radical re-assessment of
teachers' and students' roles in the classroom, a new perspective on the function
and nature of testing, and a reorientation of the very goals and techniques of the
educational programme. It is important to note that constructivism is not directly
related to the school of literary theory called deconstruction, although I am sure that
parallels could be drawn. In fact, in another publication (Kiraly 1998), I identified
an affinity between the pedagogical implications of constructivism and those of
deconstruction drawn by Arrojo (1994) concerning the learning of translation skills
through collaboration in an authentic setting. Arrojo is one of the few contemporary translation studies scholars to promote the reorganization of the conventional,
teacher-centred classroom into a forum for authentic and interactive learning. I have
chosen not to draw deconstruction further into the discussion at this point, but the
investigation of the links between these approaches would, however, be an interesting topic for further research.

A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education

5

This book is not intended as a didactic cookbook with ready-made lesson plans
and off-the-shelf classroom procedures that can be applied directly to other translation studies classrooms. From a constructivist viewpoint, the ideas presented here,
as in all acts of communication, cannot be 'objective' in the conventional sense,
corresponding to reality or truth. They are ineluctably coloured by each individual's
personal and idiosyncratic interpretations of the principles, events and examples
portrayed. While I am describing a teaching method here, it is my own personal
method, which will, by necessity and by design, differ in its applications from programme to programme and from teacher to teacher.

Towards a comprehensive teaching method: approach,
design and procedures
I would like to clarify my understanding of the concept of teaching 'method' right
from the start, by drawing on the framework proposed by Richards and Rodgers
(1986) for analyzing instructional systems in the field of foreign language teaching.
Their depiction of a teaching method as comprising the three elements of approach,
design and procedures seems particularly well suited to understanding the educational framework to be discussed here.
An approach comprises a theory of language and a theory of language learning
that serve as the foundation for the principles and practices implemented in a method.
From this perspective, the approach is clearly the most fundamental level of a method.
It relates to a view of the world and of learning, teaching and language use that can
transcend individual teaching and learning environments and the limits of individual
institutions. At the other end of the spectrum we find procedures, which include
“classroom techniques, practices and behaviour observed when the method is used”
(Richards and Rodgers 1986:20).
It is at the procedural end of the spectrum that we find the greatest degree of
diversity and variability, at the level where teachers, working collaboratively and
individually, implement a theoretical approach in actual pedagogical practice. Design is the link between an approach and pedagogical procedures. In Richards and
Rodger's words:
Design is the level of method analysis in which we consider (a) what the
objectives of a method are; (b) how language content is selected and organized within the method, that is, the syllabus model the method incorporates;
(c) the types of learning tasks and teaching activities the method advocates;
(d) the roles of learners; (e) the roles of teachers; (f) the role of instructional
materials. (ibid.:20)

My task here is to outline a theoretical approach that I hope many teachers can
share; to show how I have interpreted the implications of the approach for the design

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Donald Kiraly

of the key features of classroom interaction; and to provide some examples and
suggestions focused on the procedures I have developed for my own classroom
practice. My overriding goal in dealing with all three aspects is to provide an impetus for further interpretation, elaboration and experimentation, which I hope will
initiate a dialogue toward innovation for the empowerment of students of translation.

Sources of inspiration
The ideas presented in these pages are derived from my 15 years of experience as a
translator educator at the School of Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies of the
University of Mainz in Germersheim, Germany. The initial experiences I had during my first few semesters, when I tried to appropriate the instructional performance
techniques used by other teachers, made me decide either to work toward developing a systematic and humanistic approach to the training of translators, or to leave
the institution.
Like most other translator educators, I had also received no special training in
translation teaching methods prior to assuming my duties in Germersheim. I was
encouraged to sit in on classes run by my colleagues and to pick up ideas on how to
teach from them. This very practice, in lieu of any methods or programmes for the
training of translator educators, is clearly a major reason why the instructional performance model is perpetuated from one generation of teachers to the next. There
has been no forum for investigating the assumptions underlying this approach or
possible alternatives to it.
There is a desperate need for comprehensive degree programmes for the training
of translator trainers. This, I contend, could be a major first step out of the rut that
our profession is in, a step toward the professionalization of translator education.
We can start to educate generations of educators who know how to do classroom
research, how to recognize and focus on the ever-evolving skills and knowledge
that our graduates will need, and how to design classroom environments that lead to
professional competence. If pursued with enthusiasm, creativity and the best interests of our students, of the profession, and of society as a whole in mind, these
measures cannot help but radically improve the value and efficacy of our programmes
as well as the status of the graduate translator.

Classroom research
My initial efforts to break out of the traditional, teacher-centred mould in my own
classes culminated in my doctoral dissertation research, completed in 1990 at the
University of Illinois, and published in 1995 under the title Pathways to Translation. One part of the study was a think-aloud-protocol investigation of the cognitive
translation processes of novice and professional translators. The other part involved

A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education

7

the development of initial steps toward a systematic approach to translator education. Pathways to Translation was an exploratory study that was meant more to
raise questions than to answer them. Here, some tentative answers to those and
other related questions will be presented. These are answers that have worked for
my students, and that I hope will serve as examples for others. As I stated at the
beginning of this chapter, my assumptions have evolved considerably since Pathways was completed, in particular due to my having become acquainted with the
field of constructivist education that has been emerging for the past few decades,
particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries. I was first introduced to constructivism
through the excellent, collaboratively written volume Constructivism and the Technology of Instruction: a Conversation, edited by Thomas Duffy and David Jonassen
(1992). I then went on to read scholars including von Glasersfeld (1988), Dewey
(1938), Rorty (1979), Brown et al. (1989) and Vygotsky (1994). The more I read,
the more I realized that my personal theories of foreign language learning and translator education can best be articulated from a social constructivist perspective. The
approach to translator education outlined here owes a particular debt to Collaborative Learning by Kenneth Bruffee (1995), which convinced me of the viability of a
consistently non-foundational, social constructivist perspective. Bruffee says that
learning, “is not 'a shift inside the person which now suits him to enter ... new
relationships' with reality and with other people. It is a shift in a person's relations
with others, period” (Bruffee 1995:74).
Quintessentially, this view holds that meaning, knowledge, and the mind itself
are inextricably embedded in our personal interactions with other people. This helps
explain and justify the move in this book away from the dual cognitive-social perspective to translator competence and translator education I adopted in Pathways
to Translation. As I will explain further in Chapter 2, I now believe that the social,
inter-subjective nature of meaning, thought and mind provide a much more coherent framework for the elaboration of an approach to translator education than a
two-track, cognitive/social approach. I have come to reject the dualistic distinction
of the internal workings of the mind as being something essentially different from
the social interaction between individuals in a community. From the Vygotskyian
perspective that will emerge, I hope it will become apparent that an individual's
thought processes are so intricately intertwined with that person's social history and
interpersonal interactions that it is unnecessary and pointless to try to dissect them
and focus on them as distinct entities.
Several research projects in which I have been involved at the School of Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies of the University of Mainz (FASK) have
contributed significantly to the agenda of this volume. The first was a school-wide
study on computer-assisted translation skills instruction, which I helped co-ordinate
from 1992-1994. The second project was a two-year (1995-1997) study of classroom instruction based on classroom research methods applied in an action research
framework. The purpose of that research was to identify the roots of the problems

8

Donald Kiraly

with traditional teaching approaches, and to identify and test alternative approaches
to translation skills instruction in various types of translation studies classes. A thesis completed by one of the student researchers on this project, Uta Graceffo (1996)
elaborates the outcome of this study. Her findings have contributed significantly to
this book, and particularly to Chapter VI, which outlines the genesis of my method
for teaching translation-practice classes.
A third related study was another master's thesis done by Claudia Gelies (1997)
on the effects of communicative language instruction for translation students; this
thesis was submitted to the English and American Studies Department of the FASK
during the winter term of 1997-98. The curricula of translator education programmes
generally include considerable instruction in foreign languages. While there has
been a great deal of debate in the literature as to whether or not instruction in translation skills per se should accompany or instead only follow foreign language
instruction, little research to date has been devoted to the kind of foreign language
instruction that will best prepare translation students for their future profession. In
Chapter IX, I will present an argument for incorporating communicative approaches
for classroom language acquisition to replace or at least complement traditional
foreign language teaching in translator education programmes.

Freelance translation work
My own activities as a freelance translator over the past ten years have made a very
significant contribution to this book. It has been by translating professionally that I
myself have learned (and continue to learn) how to translate. Several factors have
been most important for the development of my own translator competence. First,
feedback from clients, authors, and readers, both positive and negative, has helped
me to develop my own personal approach toward translation and my own strategies
for dealing with translation problems. Second, advice from and collaboration with
more experienced translators has been a key factor that has helped me understand
the norms and conventions that apply to the translator's work. And finally, the fact
that all of my translation work has been embedded in a real social matrix has been a
constant reminder of the myriad real-world constraints on the translator's work.
These three factors will also be seen to play an important role in the socially situated approach to translator education I am proposing here.
From my early experiences with English language teaching using secondgeneration Structuro-Global Audio-Visual methods in France in the late 1970s, I
acquired basic underlying principles of foreign language teaching based on cooperative learning, and a view of...