Call for Papers: A special issue of Jostrans (2021) on Teaching Translation and Interpreting in Virtual Environment

Guest Editors: Dr. J. Devaux and Dr. S. Hubscher-Davidson

Since the global Covid-19 pandemic of March 2020, many universities have decided to transfer their face-to-face teaching provision to online platforms. Overnight, academics and students have seen their working environment change dramatically.. Initial discussions among the academic community seem to indicate that the transition is not without a number of hurdles, despite prior experience in using virtual learning environments and/or incorporating a distance component to face-to-face teaching. While blended learning approaches have been widely encouraged and often applied in university contexts, the speed and wholesale nature of the recent transition has prompted many to rethink how they teach and to look for new pedagogical ideas.

Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) have also trialled blended learning approaches in the teaching of these subjects for a number of years. Recent efforts to administer TIS course content at a distance have led to a call for more research investigating the use synchronous and asynchronous media (Colina and Angelelli, 2016). Although currently underexplored in TIS research, Distance Learning represents a substantial area of research in other fields, such as Education. There are notorious difficulties that arise from moving face-to-face course content into virtual environments, from designing an online course to administering assessment and fostering collaboration, interaction, and engagement.    

In this special issue, we are proposing to explore some of these difficulties in TIS. We will invite contributions covering the following key themes:

·        Online pedagogy (latest trends)

·        (a)synchronous teaching: challenges and opportunities in TIS

·        TIS curriculum and module design for online delivery

·        TIS technologies at a distance

·        TIS online Assessment

·        Fostering TIS (a)synchronous collaboration, interaction, and engagement

·        Acquiring online translation/interpreting work experience

We welcome contributions of full-length papers of between 7,000 and 8,000 words (including endnotes and references). All accepted contributions will be double blind peer-reviewed.

Publication Timeline:

31 July 2020: Deadline for submission of an extended article abstract (approximately 1,000 words + biographical note) to the guest editors for review.

j.devaux@open.ac.uk and severine.hubscher-davidson@open.ac.uk

31 August 2020: Feedback on abstract and final acceptance returned to contributors.

31 October 2020: Deadline for submission of final versions of full articles (between 7,000 and 8,000 words, incl.. endnotes and references) to guest editors.

1 November 2020 to 15 January 2021: Peer review process

26 February 2021: Deadline for submission of final versions of full articles to guest editors.

27 February 2021 to 26 March 2021: Final editorial work.

July 2021: Publication

Stylesheet: http://jostrans.org/stylesheet.pdf

Reference:

Colina, S. and Angelelli, A. (2016). Translation and interpreting pedagogy. In C. Angelelli and B. Baer (Eds.), Researching Translation and Interpreting. Routledge, Oxon.

Dr hab. Łucja Biel

Associate Professor, The Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw

Head of Corpus Research Centre

Editor-in-Chief, The Jostrans – The Journal of Specialised Translation www.jostrans.org