Experience of the teachers

Before handing it over to the client, the teachers reviewed the uploaded texts al-ready proofread by the students. In general, the texts showed that the students in-vested the necessary attention and energy in the translation. A total of two transla-tions had to be retranslated by the teachers. The deadlines had been kept almost without exception, and as a result of proofreading by other students, the quality of the texts improved. In one case, the student finished the translation so late that her proofreader could not read it in time. In this case, the reviewer turned to us for help, and finally the translation was sent by the translator without proofreading.

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The task showed the students that late delivery may cause difficulties not only for the customer, but for all participants of the translation process, and the deadline for the whole project may be jeopardised.

As the students mentioned in their evaluations, the pre-established terminol-ogy table and the chat group were used by only a few students. In the future, it would be worth developing a system that might encourage students to work more actively on the online interfaces in a similar situation. If the technological setup allows it, MemoQ’s chat function may be used as well. However, during the semes-ter we did not encourage students to use MemoQ for communication purposes, because the clients were not translators and therefore they did not own and weren’t familiar with the software. A points system might be useful in the future, where students can earn points for comments, questions and responses on the online in-terfaces, and the gathered points would be added to their end-of-semester results.

It is also possible to create specific tasks related to the additional materials. It can also be helpful if the terminology is compiled to a deadline before the translation starts, so it is not necessary for students to work on the terminology and on the translation at the same time.

Compliance with typological requirements is still a problem for students. Al-though the initial letter clearly stated that the translation should be done in the template provided by the client, many of them translated the texts in the format of the originals. This may have been due to lack of attention, but also because they worked in a CAT-tool, which might have made their work easier, but caused the target language text to deviate from the typological requirements of the client.

From the point of view of terminology, the majority of students followed the list of terms provided in advance by the clients, but the terms the team agreed on later were used less frequently – in this case the students probably did not follow the jointly-managed table. It is therefore important that students better immerse in the spirit of teamwork and realise the consequences of having many participants in the translation process. Another problem was that in many cases students had difficulty separating from the source language text and keeping the morphosyn-tactic structure of the target language text in mind during translation. It is also important to emphasise the freedom of translators when choosing synonyms, seg-menting complex sentences, using explicitations and pragmatic adaptations.

It was also difficult during the semester that the daily life of all the participants in the project changed drastically, nevertheless the teachers had to ensure the motiva-tion of the students. In many cases, students reported difficulties in their personal or family life, they missed the community at the university, and their career develop-ment had been significantly affected by the pandemic situation. The teachers had to tread with care, and had to find a middle ground between empathy and expectations.

On the basis of the above, it can be concluded that although the unexpected transition to distance learning had been difficult, project work is indeed one of the courses where the online workflow does not necessarily have a negative impact on the learning benefits of the course and even provides a special opportunity to

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velop certain competences. In the future, it is worth devising further methods to increase the online activity of students and to work out the best way to conduct such a course. We can say for sure that a real assignment and a course with a work-flow that is as close as possible to real working conditions will definitely provide students with positive and useful experiences.

5. Conclusion

During the Translating Project Work course, students learn about the full spectrum of the translation process and all the actors involved in the translation process, thus gaining knowledge about the organisational structure of translation offices and the steps in ordering a translation assignment. Communication with the client, aware-ness of translation decisions, the development of translational and proofreading skills, and the acquisition of advanced skills in the use of CAT-tools are key.

The actual real translation project was commissioned by the Képes Founda-tion, which deals with the development of programs and publications for the devel-opment of social and emotional skills, including burnout prevention and sensitisa-tion of social workers. During the project, the students translated and reviewed 64 case descriptions, typically consisting of 1000 to 1500 words. Therefore, the project involved not only one group, 17 students doing their second-year in English-Hun-garian translation project work, but also three translator students from the French-Hungarian translation project work course, six students studying on audiovisual and specialised translation courses and six former audiovisual and specialised translation students. As a result of the Covid-19 epidemic, the university switched to distance learning from the beginning of March. As for the texts to be translated, the register of the texts proved to be difficult for the students. One part of the texts was the narrative of the social caregiver and the other was the opinion of the psy-chologist. Another interesting aspect was that the written texts often carried the specificities of spoken language, which posed another challenge for the students.

After the completion of the project work, it can be concluded from the feed-back of 14 students that the students evaluated the course positively. Five of the positive evaluations pointed out that the work and the text to be translated were both realistic, and six specifically praised the fact that they were interesting. A to-tal of eight respondents particularly appreciated that they had to work not on dry legal texts but on more interesting texts that had emotional and cultural aspects as well. The majority of respondents covered three specific areas in their evaluation:

the quality of the texts to be translated, the process of proofreading and the online workflow. Based on the experience of the teachers, adhering to deadlines was not a problem, but it might be necessary to place greater emphasis on the harmonisa-tion and use of terminology and the terminology database. It was difficult for some of the students to use a target language template instead of the original formatting of the source language text for their translations, and they tended to follow the

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structure of the source language text too closely, resulting in a deterioration in the readability of the target language text. During the semester, the daily life of all participants changed drastically due to the pandemic, and therefore it was impor-tant to keep in mind the mental health of the students as well. However, the online workflow does not necessarily have a negative impact on the learning benefits of the course, and it may even provide a special opportunity to develop certain com-petences.

References

Kiraly, D. C. 2005. Project-Based Learning: A Case for Situated Translation. Meta Vol.

50. No. 4. 1098–1111.

Kovács, M. 2016. New Courses in the Curriculum: Language Technology, Supervised Translation Project Work. In: Horváth, I. (ed.) The Modern Translator and Inter-preter. Budapest: ELTE Eötvös University Press. 207–218.

Kurtán, Zs. 2003. Szakmai nyelvhasználat [The use of professional language]. Budapest:

Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó.

Internet resources:

Canvas https://canvas.elte.hu/belepes/

Képes Foundation http://www.kepesalapitvany.hu/roacutelunk.html Resicare http://www.kepesalapitvany.hu/resicare.html

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Appendix

Source language text (extract)