Critical skills in the translation classroom: Wikipedia as a learning environment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2024.e96932Keywords:
Wikipedia, translators training, critical capacity, collaborative translation, gender-equalityAbstract
Wikipedia is a free, collaborative, multilingual digital encyclopaedia and one of the most widely used resources on the Internet worldwide. Due to its great social reach, many disciplines have found in Wikipedia an invaluable area of research. The field of Translation Studies is not an exception. In this realm, Wikipedia offers great potential to explore not only linguistic and terminological aspects (McDonough Dolmaya, 2015), but also ethnographic, sociological (Jiménez Crespo, 2017; Alonso-Jiménez, 2014) and didactic perspectives. The didactic potential of Wikipedia for students of Translation Studies has been endorsed by previous studies (Kodura, 2019; Martínez Carrasco, 2017) that highlight, among other aspects, the ability to motivate students as translation is developed in a real environment that grants authenticity to translation assignments. On the basis of such experiences, which underscore the positive impact on both the motivation and collaborative skills of students, this article describes a teaching project focused on German-Spanish Wikipedia translation, gender-equality oriented, in order to evaluate its possible benefits and difficulties. The project has shown that Wikipedia texts require textual adaptation with components similar to those of journalistic translation, which employs reduction and amplification techniques as well as stylistic enhancement. The application of these techniques, which grant more freedom to the translator, requires complex decision-making and, thus, serves as a stimulus for developing students' critical capacity.
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