Curriculum Renewal in Greek Taught Postgraduate Translation Courses: Aligning Student Needs and Translation Market Requirements
The present research examines translator training in Greece, with the ultimate aim being to provide suggestions for revising the translation curriculum in Greece. It goes without saying that a translation course is usually highly vocational, and an attempt is made to simulate professional practices in the classroom. Hence, local market requirements should be pinpointed and incorporated into the translation curriculum, if translation schools are to produce fully-fledged translators and not churn out dilettantes. That is why the identification and analysis of the translation market in Greece was one of the primary objectives of the current research work. For this purpose, a questionnaire survey was conducted, addressing in-house employees of translation companies in Greece.
Another no less important objective was to explore student needs and expectations. The current practice on translator training courses suggests that it should be student-centred and not teacher-centred, as used to be the case in the past. Therefore, if we intend to contrive an all-round, comprehensive curriculum, learner needs should not be ignored.
On the contrary, they should be carefully investigated, in order to find out what it is that trainees expect to learn in a translation course and why they decided to study translation in the first place. Here again, a questionnaire survey was carried out. The respondents were not only students, but trainers too, as both groups are important stakeholders in the translation classroom.
The data gleaned from the questionnaire surveys on the translation market and student needs, combined with a thorough examination of the germane literature on translator training, ultimately provided useful feedback which served as a springboard to making concrete suggestions about how the translation curriculum in Greece could be modernised and about how translation market and student needs could be aligned with the overall aims of a translation course.
https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/9639/1/Sachinis-M-2012-PhD-Thesis.pdf