Making Connections Through Knowledge Nodes in Translator Training

Abstract

This study defines translator training as a pedagogical scheme to help learners build up a knowledge network that should sustain their professional competence. It explores specifically how a computer-assisted mode of training may contribute to systemizing such a scheme with special reference to literary translation. The tool used for such training is Textwells, an online translation teaching and learning platform that weaves textual and translation-related concepts, phenomena, and methods as “knowledge nodes” into a network to support teaching and learning in different settings. As such, different from the traditional way of arranging a literary translation course according to the subgenres of literature, this approach, facilitated by the online platform, organizes the teaching contents along a series of knowledge nodes that are deemed fundamental to the production of a literary target text. In particular, this paper gives a detailed report about the course design and teaching procedures, using the rhetoric component as an illustrating case.