Scripta Manent (Dec 2019)
A tale of two cities: Approaches to specialised language competence development in the areas of law and economics at university level
Abstract
The acquisition of specialised language competence is of great interest for teachers and translators alike. Since many modern philology programmes do not make a clear-cut distinction between the two professions and provide English / German / Romance languages students with similar language preparation for future careers, it seems pertinent to consider the way specialised language competence can be shaped during pre-service professional training at university level. Interest in defining and modelling translation competence (TC) goes back to the early 1990’s or even the late 1980’s. Since then a myriad of TC models have been proposed, differentiated by approach (minimalist, componential) and perspective (didactic, relevance-theoretic, or professional and behavioural). As the body of research into TC has been growing, researchers have not only displayed a clear preference for increasingly extensive multi-component models of TC, each featuring a number of sub-competences but also delved into specific types of translation, e.g. specialised translation. This paper outlines the most important generic and specialised TC models and subsequently, on the basis of course plans, presents how translation competencedeveloped in translation programmes at two Polish universities.
