23.3182, FYI: Translation in Language Teaching and Assessment

Tue Jul 24 19:56:47 UTC 2012

LINGUIST List: Vol-23-3182. Tue Jul 24 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.3182, FYI: Translation in Language Teaching and Assessment

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Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:56:26
From: Dina Tsagari [dinatsa at ucy.ac.cy]
Subject: Translation in Language Teaching and Assessment

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Call for Papers
for the edited volume entitled
Translation in Language Teaching and Assessment
edited by Dina Tsagari & Georgios Floros (University of Cyprus)to be 
published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Rationale:

For a very long time and across various educational contexts and 
countries, translation was one of the most important tools for teaching 
and assessing language competence. Ever since the emergence of the 
'communicative turn' and the adoption of the communicative approach 
to language teaching, translation has gradually lost importance both as 
a teaching and as an assessment tool. This decline was mainly due to 
a) fallacious perceptions of the notion of translatability on the part of 
language pedagogy or a conflation of the use of L1 with translation, 
and the equally fallacious interpretations of the translation task as the 
common attempt of finding lexical and structural correspondences 
among L1 and L2 (e.g. grammar translation in Grammar-Translation 
Method), and b) an inadequate, if not totally missing, attempt on the 
part of translation studies to examine ways of informing other domains 
of language-related activity in a manner similar to the way translation 
studies has consistently been informed by other disciplines. In other 
words, these circumstances are indexical of a relative lack of 
epistemological traffic among language learning and translation studies 
as disciplines in their own right. Nevertheless, the situation seems to 
start being reversed lately. Developments within translation studies 
have led to a more confident profile of the discipline and language 
learning (regarding both teaching and assessment) which seems to be 
rediscovering translation as a tool for its purposes. 
In this optimistic context, the intended volume seeks to a) record the 
various reasons for the resurgent interest of language learning in 
translation as well as the various contemporary ways in which 
translation may be used in language teaching and assessment, b) 
explore new ways of consolidating the relationship between language 
learning and translation by offering insights into future possibilities of 
using translation in language teaching and assessment, and c) 
examine possibilities and limitations of the interplay between the two 
disciplines in the light of current developments touching upon the 
ethical dimensions of such an interaction. The ultimate aim, in a 
nutshell, is to examine whether the call for reinstating translation as a 
component of language teaching (Cook, 2010) and assessment has 
indeed borne fruit and explore the ways in which this is accomplished. 

Topics to be covered in the volume:

Topics to be covered in this volume will include, but are not limited to: 

Teaching:
-  The use of translation as a method of teaching in language learning
-  The use of translation in language teaching materials
-  Research strands in translation studies and their possible impact on 
language teaching
-  Experimental approaches to applying translation in language 
teaching
-  New technologies for using translation in language learning curricula
-  The targeted use of translation for very specific 
aspects/phenomena/areas of language teaching  

Assessment:
-  Issues of design, development, preparation, administration, marking 
and evaluation of translation as a method in language assessment 
(and testing)
-  Issues of reliability and validity of the use of translation in language 
assessment (e.g. marking schemes, criteria, score interpretation, etc)
-  The application of translation in language assessment to new 
challenges and with diverse populations
-  Comparability issues in translation assessment across various 
contexts and languages
-  The targeted use of translation for specific language aspects/areas 
of language assessment

Teaching and Assessment Ethics:
-  Choosing appropriate topics, texts and material for language-related 
and assessment-related translation assignments
-  Translation ethics and their possible impact on language teaching 
and assessment 
-  Language translation teaching and assessment as opposed to 
professional translation teaching and assessment
-  The use of translation as a method of teaching and assessing 
dialectal varieties in specific contexts
Contributors to the volume are expected to address the issues from a 
theoretical as well as from an empirical point of view. The working 
language of the chapters of the volume will be English. However, any 
language pair (as L1, L2, FL) can be the focus of research of the 
contributions.

Structure of the volume:

The structure of the edited volume is expected to be as follows:
1. Introduction to the volume
2. Part I: Contributions from the Language Learning and Assessment 
Perspective
3. Part II: Contributions from the Translation Studies Perspective

Contributors:

Contributors to the volume will be academics, researchers, 
professionals (test developers or representatives of a professional 
organization) in the fields of both translation studies and language 
teaching and assessment as well as postgraduate students (PhD level) 
who have completed or are about to complete research in the area of 
teaching and assessing languages through translation.

Audience:

The edited volume is primarily intended for:
-  Scholars in the field of Translation Studies, Language Teaching and 
Assessment
-  Educational policy makers and administrators
-  Language testing organizations and test developers
-  Researchers with an interest in translation teaching and assessment
-  Postgraduate students
-  Language teachers and teacher trainers
-  Material writers and publishers

Procedures and schedule:

Those interested please submit a preliminary proposal. Proposals will 
be approximately 1 page (A4 size) or roughly 500 words in length.  
These will include the following information:
-  Title of article
-  Author name(s), affiliation(s), and detailed contact information
-  Proposal 

Proposals will be evaluated according to:
a. relevance to the topics of the volume
b. language of the proposal (needs to conform to native-speaker 
standards for academic writing)
c. clear address of the problem/issue/research question/s discussed 
d. clear outline of conclusions of the study (in the case of a research-
oriented paper)
e. clear and coherent structure of the proposal as a whole

Successful authors will be invited later to submit full papers for peer 
review following normal procedures based on the formatting guidelines 
of the publisher.   

Timeline:

Overall, the following timeline is anticipated:

Deadline for extensive abstracts: 20 September 2012
Deadline review of abstracts and invitation to write whole paper: 5 
October 2012
Full paper submission deadline: 10 December 2012
Comments from special editors: 20 January 2013 
Revised draft submission deadline: 15 February 2013
Comments from special editors: 15 March 2013 
Final draft submission deadline: 25 April 2013
Submission of manuscript to publishers: 1 June 2013
Anticipated publication date: September 2013 

Contact:

Please send proposals to Dina Tsagari (dinatsa at ucy.ac.cy) and 
George Floros (gfloros at ucy.ac.cy).  

Informal inquiries may be sent to the same email addresses.  

Dina Tsagari
Lecturer in Applied Linguistics/TEFL
Department of English Studies
University of Cyprus
www.ucy.ac.cy
Tel. ++ 357 - 22892120
Fax ++ 357 - 22750310

Coordinator
EALTA CBLA SIG 
http://www.ealta.eu.org/

Dr Georgios FLOROS 
Assistant Professor, Translation Studies 
University of Cyprus 
Department of English Studies 
75 Kallipoleos Ave. 
P.O.Box 20537 
1678 Nicosia, CYPRUS 

+357 22 89 21 24 (office) 
+357 22 75 03 10 (fax) 
gfloros at ucy.ac.cy 
http://www.new.ucy.ac.cy/~gfloros.aspx 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Translation

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