The final selection of Teaching programmes is made up of 40 resources: 9 in Greece, 15 in Spain and 16 in Italy. The search was limited to the three DIALOGOS partner countries for time constraints.
Inclusion criteria were the following: a) courses offered by Higher Education Institutions (HEI) or by EU funded projects on a steady basis and b) programmes that either refer to the public services settings and/or translation/interpreting (T/I). The criterion of delivering at least a Language of Lesser Diffusion (LLD)-specific T/I module was excluded after the first search, since the very concept of LLD became matter of discussion within the Consortium (an Appendix on this topic is included in the Report). The selected teaching programmes show an attempt of interdisciplinarity.
Highlights
- IT: A very relevant teaching/training programme for DIALOGOS is the 1-year course in Linguistic Assistance for Legal and Healthcare Settings designed and delivered by the Università di Bologna-Forlì. Not only does it target University students, but also others no university degree but with work experience. It is at its first edition, also inspired by the outputs and outcomes of the ReACTMe Project, and it will be worth following its evolution and creating synergies with DIALOGOS.
- ES: UAH: Master’s Degree in Intercultural Communication, Interpreting and Translation in Public Services
- EL: AUTH MA in Conference interpreting and Translation, with a double track: conference interpreting and translation studies. MA in Politics, Language and Intercultural Communication (POLICO), Ionian University, which looks more centred on intercultural communication, but it is only delivered in EL.
Languages offered within all selected teaching programmes, extra European LLDs, other than Arabic and Chinese, are underrepresented.
Settings relevant to the DIALOGOS project (social-healthcare and legal-humanitarian): the majority of the selected teaching programmes does not offer a specialization in them. Only a few MAs, i.e., UAH’s or the one in International Communication, Translation and Interpreting offered by the Universidad Pablo de Olavide and the Specialization course in Linguistic Assistance for Legal and Healthcare Settings offered by Università di Bologna-Forlì.
T/I techniques and modes: most selected programmes apparently offer both translation and interpreting. Conference interpreting is still more represented than dialogue interpreting (and sign language courses that this mapping do not delve into).
The final selection of Training materials is made up of 55 resources. Resources were coded according to the different sector they could be mainly referred to: H stands for Healthcare, L for Legal, M for Mixed settings and R for Refugees-specific resources. The final selection of resources is composed as follows: 18 H, 9 L, 18 M, R10.
The search followed these steps:
- Reviewing the materials created by EU funded projects, relevant to DIALOGOS, starting from the ones where at least one organisation/member of the DIALOGOS Teams had been actively involved in (direct knowledge), moving then to those where no DIALOGOS organisation/team member had been directly involved.
- Mapping the networks/groups/organisation/resources referred to in some of the selected teaching programmes, i.e. ORCIT (Online Resources for Conference Interpreter Training), JURINTE (Interprofessional training for court interpreting, Ghent University), CIUTI (Conférence internationale permanente d’instituts universitaires de traducteurs et interprètes, including all the EU projects that could be retrieved from its webpage and which often coincided with the above-mentioned ones).
- More Erasmus+ projects were searched, in the relevant EU portal, giving some key words such as: interpret-, mediat-, legal, health-.
- Searching outside the EU (International Medical Interpreters Association in the US; the Health Care Interpreter Network and the National Council of Interpreting in Health Care; the latter has a specific LLD section and group).
- DIALOGOS-relevant EU Agencies: UNHCR, European Asylum Support Office and European Union Agency for Asylum.
Some obstacles
- fee required (subscription) to access materials.
- difficult to delimit/define the specific field.
- LLDs are present in the selected resources, but in a scarce amount (mainly leaflets).
- Academia vs. “Emergency World” (i.e., Translators without Borders): Different needs, and therefore, different materials.