Translator teacher development: Exploring translator teacher beliefs about language education from a multilingual and socio-cultural perspective

"Communicative competence in at least two languages" is a prerequisite for translation. Language education (LE) in translator training however, "especially since translation has become a fully-fledged academic discipline", has "received insufficient attention", primarily because "students are supposed to have the required skills at the time of admission". And yet, language proficiency among students is a long-standing problem and is recognised by teachers as an undisputedly central requirement for translation. However, as Massey points out the focus in the literature "has been almost exclusively on student competences and their development rather than on those actually doing the teaching". As such, there is a paucity of research about translator teacher education (TTE), in particular about LE for translation. I see this void as space for innovation and the chance to inform TTE for LE with the latest insights from educational and applied linguistics theory. The theoretical framework and design of this proposal thus draw on the social turn and the multilingual turn for both TTE and LE. From a translation perspective, I set out to expand on research by Wu et al. (2019) who evidenced the importance of LE in translator training, identified constraints faced by translation teachers in LE and call for further research into TTE.

The main headings of the proposed literature review and links to strategic priorities are summarized in Figure 1 and explained below. The socio-cultural turn, referring to Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory, sees social interaction as an essential part of learning in LE, the formation of teacher cognitions and translator training. Sociocultural theory is not new and Vygotsky's contributions in the field of educational psychology to learner development are well known, however, the influence of his work in teacher education is more recent. The multilingual turn challenges the "bounded, unitary and reified conceptions of languages and related notions of "native speaker" and "mother tongue" arguing instead for the more complex fluid understandings of "voice", "language as social practice" and a related "sociolinguistics of mobile resources". I aim to examine how these turns resonate with the 'chaotic' environment translators work in, as described by Kiraly (2015:22). The social turn in language teacher education posits that teacher cognitions are not fixed but can be shaped through social interaction and that "research shows that teachers can transform their own beliefs, echoing calls for "competence-specific" "self-training".

Finally, the relationship between socio-cultural theory and teacher beliefs should illustrate the potential of my research to inform more "flexible 'blueprints'" to replace entrenched "transmissionist" teaching practices in translation.

The purpose of this research is to better understand translator teacher beliefs about language education (LE) and add these voices to the conversation about effective TTE for LE. I propose to frame this through the lenses of the multilingual and social turns. I posit that LE delivered from a multilingual and socio-cultural perspective may in fact be effective for language teacher development not only for translation, but for teaching all language learners navigating a world with freely accessible neural machine translation.

I propose to adopt a core typology of a sequential explanatory mixed methods design for this project and offers the practical advantage of splitting data collection into two distinct data-collection periods, conducive to a more realistic research timetable achievable within the duration of the award.