Enacting Authentic Collaborative Learning Through Internship Translation Projects In Translator Education

In competence-based translator education,authentic translation projects(or authentic project-based learning,PBL)are widely used as a situated learning method to prepare students for the market.This dissertation starts with a look at PBL's intradisciplinary,industry,and interdisciplinary roots.It then brings together eleven empirical accounts for a cross-case analytic review.By benchmarking them against each other in terms of their commission features,contextual features,participant features,technological features,workflow,gaps with industry standards,scaffoldings provided,assessment methods,and by examining how each of them is designed as a research,we hope to form a comprehensive empirical basis from which to interrogate features of authentic PBL.Indeed,we find that “authentic translation projects” are often used in unexamined ways.While traditional projects are embedded in a course as a one-off practicum for a set class of students,new internship projects,which are organized inhouse on the sidelines of the curriculum,are emerging.If the external partner has long-term translation request,the team set up for one commission will sustain,and go on to form a Community of Practice(Co P).Most research on PBL focuses on depicting the workflow of one commission and trying to establish its effects on student's individual translation competence.We perceive a dearth of studies investigating the full set of practices and the social learning enacted by ongoing internship projects in the true sense of the word.By way of illustration,we zoom in on one project which has been running as a Co P in an ethnographic case study.The research lens will follow the group of students recruited at the project's fifth year,to track how they are selected into the team,how in one and a half years' time,they have moved from being peripheral observers,to working alongside more competent older members,to moving to the center of production,and to mentoring the sixth year's recruits.In addition to this macro process,the study also brings into relief their collaboration patterns with each other and with translation technologies,and their effort to achieve centralized management of translation asset.The study shows that along the way,this group of students have inherited a common heritage formed within the community,including shared goals,understandings,and practices,and that they have successfully maintained the continuity of the project.As an outlier to conventional projects,the case broadens our understanding of the possibilities of PBL.We conclude by arguing that 1)There is a need to establish conceptual clarity of authentic PBL by differentiating between one-off projects,and ongoing internship projects;2)To maintain the continuity of a long running project,the challenges lie not only in achieving the quality of one commission,but in achieving consistent quality across different commissions,which means in addition to standardized workflow and quality control procedures,every member must identify with the community's standards and culture and have access to a set of constantly updated resources.It is in this sense that the recruitment,training,real time collaboration and language asset management practices adopted in the case are of significance;3)Consequently,authentic collaborative learning in a Co P not only lies at the individual level,but also at the technological and community level,as the members work together to build a shared repertoire in line with technology trends and industry best practices;and 4)As a rich source of artefact-mediated real-time data,the collaborative dialogues the participants leave in the ICTs deserve to be better assessed to reveal more insights on the participants' collaboration patterns in PBL.