MODEL OF BLENDED, INTEGRATIVE AND GROUP TEACHIING OF TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING STUDIES WITH WEB 2.0

The article covers different aspects and modelling of Blended Translation Studies teaching at higher education. It outlines didactics, design and implementation of the experimental project on written and oral translation studies (American English specialized translation course, http://amvkclass.pbworks.com/) with the help of Web 2.0., wiki, Prezi and other free access online resources at MESI University. Internet-based and blended courses are suitable for different educational purposes, and one of the important tasks is to individualize learning and teaching process and spread it far and beyond traditional classes and group teaching. Such approach is sometimes applied to professional linguists and translators training. The said project was aimed to study how GROUP teaching. The aim was to prove the possibility of mass or group translators training and to give designing a new course model a try. Blended wiki site collaboration was followed by the conference supported with written translations and interpreting practice. With Web 2.0 technologies, it was planned to provide intensive practical experience and to develop team work as required in real working situations. Participants of the project: total (100%) random of students (2 academic groups, 33 persons) in linguistics, translation studies and intercultural communication at non-linguistic university. Course duration: 2 months. The task was to select text and video for translation whether from 4 proposed multinational corporations (MNC) open original websites, or 2 US Universities. Students added themselves on the wik-site front page table and posted there the selected text and video clip. Next, students arranged 5 project groups. And created own files. After that, they did a research on the project issues. The teacher guided the process. Students edited, saved their translations to prepare a final group report and joint presentation. At the conference, all teams reported by turn on the original websites and videos translation. 99% of students participated in the project, completed all tasks and were graded. To conclude: The model suggests real role playing, project work, language learning and translation studies at the same time, guided and supervised by the teacher. This teaming didactics turned to be very motivating: even the ‘weakest’ students participated. In general, students expressed interest in creative projects and were especially enjoying oral peers reports oral translation and self- interpreting of video clips in public. So, in our opinion, that educational didactics could be applied at least as additional course and complete standard academic curriculum in translation studies. Blending it with Web 2.0. tools (e.g. wiki, Prezi, CALL, corporate university MSSharePoint LMS) provides fruitful, beneficial and intensive course implementation in a very short time. There were also some problems such as time and subject shortcomings, extra workload, poor conference timing, lack of spontaneous consecutive interpreting practice and some more, to be analyzed. The model needs further research and experiment to develop new blending curriculum and didactics for higher education students. This article could be interesting for all language and translation studies educators at universities.

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