L1 to L2 Translation Practices in Foreign Language Teacher Education: Student Teachers’ Views

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to elicit student teachers’ views regarding the translation practices they were engaged in within the content of a compulsory ‘L1 to L2 translation’ course. During a 12-week translation class in 2018 Spring semester, 22 student teachers were asked to translate different types of texts: literary texts, recipes, magazine articles, official documents, and oral texts. They also deal with different translation practices such as prepared translation, unprepared in-class translation with and without dictionaries or online translation tools, constructing multiple-choice translation test items, and oral translation. At the end of the training, the student teachers were asked to rank those different practices and text types according to their usefulness and difficulty. They were also asked to explain their reasons for those ideas. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the obtained data showed that each translation practice and each text type had its advantages and disadvantages for student teachers in their way to become foreign language teachers. A number of suggestions and implications are also provided for student teachers and teacher trainers for the translation courses in teacher education programs.