últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

ADAURI BREZOLIN: RECENT WORK ON THE TEACHING OF TRANSLATION IN BRAZIL
certify that graduates can only teach the subject areas of their undergraduate major.
Students, as a rule, opt for this combination. As a result, the graduates, who are unable to
walk into the kind of job originally envisaged, can at least become teachers, so the Teaching
Certification is seen as an asset.
Similarly, the Letras graduates also take the Licenciatura and become teachers of
languages, so these programs are, willy-nilly, Teacher Education Programs. Besides that,
the aims and goals of this combination seem to be very broad and unclear, since graduates
can work in areas such as, editorial services, text revision, linguistic assistance, research,
translation and teaching. How do Translation Programs fit into this picture?
As already mentioned, some 30 years ago, the Language and Literature programs
usually offered by public universities had not been meeting the market demand, so, in order
to fill this gap, similar programs were created by mainly private institutions. In order to
attract more students, a differential was included, that is, Translation in some institutions or
Translation and Interpreting, in others. Since then, these programs have been active and an
increase in their number has been observed.
But what is wrong with these Translation or Translation and Interpreting
Programs? Although changes have been made in terms of syllabus and class time load, they
were created following the Letras structure as a model, that is, the basic framework was
maintained. In general, these programs, reasonably modified nowadays, offer a major in
Translation or Translation/Interpreting and, say, a minor in Teaching Certification.
However, either in a Translation or in a Translation/Interpreting Program, students are
more likely to be trained to become teachers instead of translators or interpreters. So, our
criticism lies basically in the fact that these Translation or Translation/Interpreting
Programs also have very broad, unclear aims and goals, very similar to those proposed by
the Letras + Licenciatura Programs, and train graduates who, according to their generic
objectives, can walk into a diverse number of jobs, for which they have not received
adequate preparation.
According to my investigation in the city of São Paulo, none of the institutions
analyzed can offer a “full” Translation Program. In general, they offer a combined
certification, in which roughly 70% of the syllabus concentrates on culture and civilization,
linguistics, language learning, as well as on literatures. Prospective graduates, as a result, can
only choose from programs that offer a combination of Language and Translation,
Language and Translation/Interpreting as a major, and Teaching Certification, as a minor.
So, according to our view, none of these institutions is training translators proper. A similar
opinion is found in Schäffner’s words:
translation classes are traditionally part of language programmes at universities.
But these classes, as a rule, neither produce graduates with a translation degree nor do they
prepare them for work as a professional translator (1998: 117).
Consequently, if the so-called Translation Programs have been closely based on the
Language and Literature Programs, the teaching of translation has, in general, been used as
a means for the student to achieve proficiency in the foreign language, instead of receiving
a specific training in Translation or in Interpreting. It is important to mention this because
foreign language students and translation students have different profiles.
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