Students of the Faculty of Philology work on translations for NGOs in a teaching innovation project

Professor Rosanna Rion, in the middle, with some participating students of the project.
Professor Rosanna Rion, in the middle, with some participating students of the project.
Academic
(28/11/2016)

In the website of the Department of Labour, Social Affairs and Families of the Generalitat de Catalunya there is the Report on the Integration of Immigrant People in Catalonia 2015. On the first page it says “this document has been translated thanks to the Project Traducció Solidària from the Department of English Studies at the University of Barcelona”. This results from a teaching innovation project of the UB that allows students from the Faculty of Philology to work on translations for NGOs and non-profit making entities using professional procedures and tools of this sector. This project, named Traducció Solidària, was launched last year with English Studies students, and they already have collaborations with UNICEF Barcelona and SOS Racisme.

Professor Rosanna Rion, in the middle, with some participating students of the project.
Professor Rosanna Rion, in the middle, with some participating students of the project.
Academic
28/11/2016

In the website of the Department of Labour, Social Affairs and Families of the Generalitat de Catalunya there is the Report on the Integration of Immigrant People in Catalonia 2015. On the first page it says “this document has been translated thanks to the Project Traducció Solidària from the Department of English Studies at the University of Barcelona”. This results from a teaching innovation project of the UB that allows students from the Faculty of Philology to work on translations for NGOs and non-profit making entities using professional procedures and tools of this sector. This project, named Traducció Solidària, was launched last year with English Studies students, and they already have collaborations with UNICEF Barcelona and SOS Racisme.

Professor Rosanna Rion, leader of the initiative, said she had two objectives: students participating in a social project and becoming familiar with the ICT tools translators use. “I wanted to adapt the course to the real world; students who participate in the project are making a task with a different responsibility and rigor from the work in class” says Rion. “I also wanted a responsibility-side towards society”, she continued. The initiative became a teaching innovation project with the participation -last year- of eight students of the course in Translation I, from the bachelor degree in English Studies, which could be an interesting course for students of other bachelor degrees in the Faculty of Philology, according to Rion.

The students who take part in the project are working in group: they divide the tasks and share problems. They used translation memories, software used by professionals that help giving coherence to the text (for example, they keep the way in which each word has been translated to use it again when it comes up), apart from checking several aspects of the text format. In this project, they use the translation memory MateCat, a free software that Rion chose after speaking with the Language Services of the UB.
 
The students who participated in this project, like Alba and Lorna, say they were motivated by the fact that they could work with professional methodology and could learn new things. They say they had to solve technical problems that were new to them: “We found that NGOs have their own vocabulary”, says Irene. Rosanna says it is very exciting to work in a text that will later be published, “and the responsibility you feel when working on it”.