Translation as a Profession (Benjamins Translation Library)

chapter 17Training translatorsIntroductionThere have never been as many university courses and programmes in translationas there are today and the time has therefore come to have a long hard think aboutthe challenges we face in training future translators and about possible ways ofmeeting these challenges.To many people, the very idea of training translators is nonsensical. All youneed to do, they say, is to wait for translators to emerge naturally, like so manymushrooms, from among the linguists, by vocation or by accident.But this argument is no longer sustainable: obviously, there are just notenough spontaneously generated translators around to meet market demandsboth in technical translation and literary translation as the number of literarytranslation courses that have sprung up over the last few years would suggest.If the axiom that translators trained ‘on the job’ are necessarily good translatorsis patently untrue (that claim being mostly made by people whose own workis more often than not substandard) it is just as absurd to pretend that anyone whohas graduated with a degree in translation will necessarily make a good translator.There are brilliant translators in both categories and there are mediocre translatorsin both categoriesEveryone agrees that there is indeed a need to train translators to meet existingdemand and also to face rising volumes in the future, but there should also beagreement on the need to train good translators and to train them well. Thisis a bigger challenge than many would think since the situation today is toomany translation graduates not finding employment and too many employersor companies not finding the right translators (meaning ‘suitable’ for the jobs orcontracts).1. Course objectives and profilesIt is high time academics stopped pretending the design of translator trainingcourses is a complicated matter. After many years of well-informed debate, ev-