 
 
Technology-enhanced Translator Training 
Jarmila FICTUMOVA 
Department of English and American Studies 
Faculty of Arts  
Masaryk University 
Arna Nováka 1 
602 00 Brno 
Czech Republic 
fictumov@phil.muni.cz 
    Abstract 
The aim of the paper is to present an Open Source 
Learning Management System for creating courses 
in translation theory and practice. Some of its most 
important characteristics are: 
• Choice of course formats such as by week, 
by topic or social format 
• Flexible array of course activities - 
Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, 
Choices, Surveys, Assignments 
• Full user logging and tracking - activity 
reports for each student are available 
• Mail integration - copies of forum posts 
and teacher feedback can be mailed 
• Assignment Module with due date and 
grade requirements  
The training includes the use of corpora (mono- 
and bilingual) and TM tools, with tasks ranging 
from alignment of texts and creating a translation 
memory, to terminology extraction from 
specialized comparable language corpora and other 
translation projects. 
1 Introduction 
In the last decade the practice of translating and 
therefore also training of translators, like many 
other features of our lives, have undergone a major 
change. Is it a change for the better or for the 
worse? To answer this question we have to 
consider several aspects and characteristics of  
present-day translation and translator training. The 
title of this paper uses the attribute “technology-
enhanced”. I will explain what is meant by this 
adjective and how indispensable technology has 
become for translators nowadays. I will touch upon 
problems of translating into L2 and the resources 
and tools available for dealing with this sort of 
translation. Finally, the personality of the teacher 
of translation and his/her background will be 
considered.  
2 History and New Developments 
Fifteen years ago, before the Velvet Revolution
1
, 
a teacher of translation under the communist 
regime was left to his/her own devices as to what 
to do. The access to foreign language press and 
broadcasts was limited due to political reasons, 
rather than technical ones, and so were the copying 
facilities. The authorities required registration of 
all copied materials, trying to prevent the 
inevitable – spreading of information on 
“forbidden” topics.  
Typing with a number of carbon papers to 
produce enough copies for the class used to be 
a standard procedure. Extracts from fiction, written 
by dead or “approved” authors, were the most 
easily accessible sources of language materials. 
Magazines, journals and newspapers were difficult 
to get hold of but much more popular with the 
students. The same was true about any authentic 
video material, TV recordings or films showing 
life beyond the Iron Curtain, i.e. in the West. Using 
news items in lessons sometimes meant risking a 
clash with the official version of reports on public 
radio and TV channels.  
But after 1989 sweeping changes occurred. 
Copiers, news broadcasts, newspapers and an 
abundance of books in foreign languages became 
reality – with more to come: computers and the 
Internet. We have been flooded with information 
and technologies. It did not happen overnight, and 
all the technological paraphernalia are not easy or 
cheap to get. However, they are here, they are 
available and furthermore, we are expected to use 
them efficiently. 
2.1 Translators 
For translators the advent of computers has meant 
a revolutionary change. All the shelves of 
reference materials, encyclopaedias and 
dictionaries are now inside the computer and there 
                                                 
1
 1989 in former Czechoslovakia 
 
is much more in there (Harold, 2003). The 
situation is now reversed: instead of the lack of 
resources and technology, there is too much for a 
person to be able to come to grips with. Translators 
are required to be at the cutting edge of 
technological endeavour. They are expected to be 
linguistic geniuses and translate into and from their 
mother tongue. “Mother tongue” is sometimes no 
longer so easy to establish and is therefore called 
the “language of habitual use”.  
2.1.1 Training of Translators 
Training of translators, like translation itself, has 
become computer-bound. No translator can do 
without mastering the basics of text processing and 
looking up information on the Internet. But this is 
by no means all of it. Translator training should 
make it possible for the students to use the 
computer with ease and confidence. It should teach 
them how to use all the necessary tools that are 
supposed to make translation more efficient and 
that, hopefully, also guarantee better quality of 
translation.  
Translation teachers have the option to use new 
Learning Management Systems to provide direct 
access to links on the Internet and familiarize the 
students with the reality of working with electronic 
texts in the virtual environment. For a comparison 
of the various systems, use the link provided in the 
footnote at the bottom of this page
2
. 
However, as Anthony Pym explains in his paper 
on E-Learning and Translator Training, we should 
“work with people as well as technology, since the 
people, not the tools, are the ones who are going to 
solve your problems and achieve progress in 
learning. This (…) point perhaps deserves special 
emphasis. As translation itself becomes an 
increasingly technical concern, much of our 
teaching inevitably concerns techniques, skills, 
tools, procedures, in fact anything except people. 
An exclusive focus on the technicalities of e-
learning is likely to take us even further down that 
road. And yet, when all is said and done, all our 
communication is human-to-human, be it face-to-
face or across the planet. If the social principles of 
learning communities and teaching teams can be 
maintained and developed, there is no 
overwhelming reason why technology should not 
extend rather than restrict the humanity of our 
task.” My experience has shown that 
a combination of e-classes with traditional classes 
taking place every week is very effective. That 
explains the title of this article. I use technology to 
                                                 
                                                
2
 http://www.edutools.info/course/compare/index.jsp
enhance the teaching rather than substitute the 
teacher-student and student-student interaction in 
the classroom.  
3 The Learning Environment 
3.1 Background on Open Source Software 
The following information is from the Corporate 
University Enterprise (CUE) White Paper: “The 
history of open source software is very closely 
related to the history of the Internet itself. It can be 
traced to post-Sputnik initiatives during the 
Eisenhower administration. Because the 
Eisenhower administration did not want to 
concentrate technology research in the Pentagon, 
money was provided to universities and new non-
military government entities such as NASA and 
the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). 
These agencies and universities became heavily 
involved in developing computing and 
communications technologies.” 
Like so much of the open source applications 
that are available, the tools have been 
conceptualised and created to fill a need in the 
university setting. Learning management systems 
in the university setting are focused on online 
collaboration, often as a supplement to classroom 
education. This was a major criterion for our 
choosing Moodle (i.e. Modular Object-Oriented 
Dynamic Learning Environment). Moodle is in 
many ways a one-man campaign by the Australian 
Martin Dougiamas. As he himself says: ‘Moodle is 
my perpetual work in progress.’  
 
3.1.1 Availability 
 
Moodle
3
 is a course management system (CMS) - 
a software package designed to help educators 
create quality online courses. Such e-learning 
systems are sometimes also called Learning 
Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning 
Environments (VLE). One of the main advantages 
of Moodle over other systems is a strong 
grounding in social constructionist pedagogy. This 
means that the role of the teacher changes – he or 
she is no longer the only source of knowledge but 
more of a mediator of information and moderator 
of discussions. 
Moodle is Open Source
4
 software, which 
means that you are free to download it, use it, 
modify it and even distribute it under the terms of 
the General Public License (GNU)
5
. Moodle runs 
without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, 
 
3
 http://moodle.org/
4
 http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php 
5
 http://moodle.org/doc/?frame=licence.html 
 
Mac OS X, Netware and any other system that 
supports PHP, including most web host providers. 
Data is stored in a single database: MySQL and 
PostgreSQL are best supported, but it can also be 
used with Oracle, Access, Interbase, ODBC and 
others.  
3.2 How does it work? 
Once Moodle has been installed on the server, 
the teacher has a chance to develop an electronic 
course totally independently of the technician. It is 
true that problems resulting from the very nature of 
computer technology do occur, but apart from 
these, teachers can work on their own and use all 
the creativity and resources they desire. The 
teaching takes place in a classroom equipped with 
a data projector and a screen and has access to the 
Internet. Students are asked to print out their 
version after submitting them and bring the hard 
copy to class. It is necessary to have something to 
fall back upon when there is a technical problem 
and the data projector in the classroom does not 
work or if there is another technical problem and 
no assignments can be displayed on the screen.  
 
First of all there is the option to choose 
between a weekly format, a topics format or even 
the social format. The weekly and topics formats 
are very similar in structure. The main difference is 
that each box in the weekly format covers exactly 
one week and has the date, whereas in the topics 
format each box can cover whatever you like. The 
social format doesn't use much content at all and is 
based around just one forum - this is displayed on 
the main page (hence it is not suitable for our 
purposes). 
In a practical translation class each topic can 
be devoted to a different type of text  (letters – 
business and personal, articles, contracts etc.). The 
teacher can include resources for the study of the 
topic by uploading files. See the description under 
Resources. 
Creating a course involves adding course 
activity modules to the main page in the order that 
students will be using them. They can be shuffled 
any time. To turn on editing, the toggle switch 
"Turn on editing" under Administration must be 
on. It shows or hides the extra controls necessary 
to manipulate the main course page. To add a new 
activity, the type of activity is selected from a pop-
up menu. After adding activities the teacher can 
move them up and down in the course layout by 
clicking on arrow icons next to each one. They can 
also be deleted by using the cross icon, and re-
edited by using the edit icon.  
Within each topic or week the teacher can use 
an array of course activities: forums – to present 
students’ contributions and stimulate discussion, 
journals to make the students describe the 
procedure when fulfilling a more complex or 
difficult task, or quizzes to test the students’ 
progress in mastering the basics of translation 
theory (a multiple-choice or true-false test) or the 
pitfalls of interference (translating sentences from 
the mother tongue – short-answers test). The 
questions are kept in a categorised database, and 
can be re-used within courses and even between 
courses. Quizzes can allow multiple attempts. Each 
attempt is automatically marked, and the teacher 
can choose whether to give feedback or to show 
correct answers or both. All answers can be 
evaluated later and more options can be added to 
the “correct answers”. 
Resources are the content of the course. 
Teachers may have existing content that they want 
to add to the course, such as web pages, audio 
files, video files (e.g. tutorials), Word documents, 
flash animations or even TM-tool files (.pxf and 
.txf). Any type of file that exists can be uploaded 
into the course and stored on the server. While the 
files are on the server they can be moved, renamed, 
edited or deleted. Updating materials is therefore 
very easy and can be done fairly quickly. 
An assignment is usually set with a due date and 
a maximum grade. Students are able to upload one 
file. The date they upload their file is recorded. 
Afterwards, there is a single page on which each 
file (and how late or early it is) can be viewed, 
including the date and feedback. Half an hour after 
the teacher grades any particular student, Moodle 
will automatically email that student a notification. 
If the teacher corrects the student’s assignment 
using “track changes” in Word, the student can 
then access the corrections in a feedback file that 
is uploaded in Moodle. This feature was added by 
our administrator at the teachers’ request and was 
named echo-assignment.  
Before the actual class takes place class 
members can view all the echo-assignments. After 
the deadline for submitting the assignment has 
expired, students can read their peers’ translations 
and prepare for the discussion based on their 
translations.  
It is also possible for the student, if the 
teacher allows it, to re-submit assignments after 
the class, making the necessary changes or 
improvements. 
The teacher can use the Logs link (under 
Administration) to get access to complete, raw 
logs. The teacher will see a link to a pop-up 
window that updates every sixty seconds and 
shows the last hour of activity. Activity Reports 
 
(next to each name in the list of all people, or from 
any user profile page) provide the teacher with 
a comprehensive overview of what any particular 
person has been up to in the course.  
According to the CUE report, features are the 
main strength of Moodle. The features listed above 
are only a sample. Language support is another 
strength. Currently, Moodle is available in 34 
languages
6
, with more under development. The 
Czech version is currently being prepared at our 
department. Moodle is the only open source LMS 
to truly address the issue of human resource 
information systems (HRIS) integration. The latest 
release has a graphical user interface (GUI) tool to 
hook into various external database formats. 
 
3.3 Courses  
 
Now I would like to show you what translation 
courses have been taught at our department
7
 using 
Moodle: 
 
Courses 
Becoming a Translator B
8
Translation Analysis A
Borderline Cases in Translation
9
Introduction to Translation (Spring 2004)
10
                                                 
6
 http://moodle.org/download/lang/ 
 
7
 http://www.phil.muni.cz/angl/e-
learn/course/category.php?id=2 
 
8
 Jarmila Fictumova: Practical translation exercises, using 
the computer. Students will employ the Internet, language 
corpora and CAT tools in translating non-literary texts. They 
will deal with translations from and into English, create their 
own glossaries of terms and try to revise translations. 
 
9
 Jiri Rambousek : The course examines texts and 
language phenomena that represent borderline cases in 
translation and cannot therefore be dealt with by means of 
translation proper. These instances should lead us to some 
general observations about systemic differences between 
languages and cultures, as well as about translation. 
We shall concentrate on short isolated texts (e.g. public 
signboards and announcements, advertisement texts), short 
literary texts strongly dependant on language (anecdote, 
limerick...) or some specific forms that hardly meet the 
standards of textuality (crossword puzzles, secret codes). The 
students will be asked to (a) translate/transfer these texts into 
Czech, (b) collect and compare original texts in both 
languages, (c) define systemic differences between the two 
languages and cultures and rules for handling these instances, 
both from literature and from their own experience. 
10
 Simona Mazacova, Jiri Rambousek: The students will be 
acquainted with the basic terms in the field of translation and 
translation studies and with a brief outline of the development 
of approaches to translation. At the beginning of the course, 
Nida and Taber's Science of Translating
Translation Analysis B
Translation and Humour
11
Translation and Humour (Spring 2004)
Translation of Essays
Translation of Literature for Children
Translation Pot-Pourri
Translation Project 2004
 
Table 1: List of Courses 
 
4 Other Tools and Resources 
As mentioned earlier, translators are frequently 
asked to translate into L2, rather than into their 
mother tongue. This can bring about problems 
even for very competent non-native users of the 
target language (TL). Educated native speakers not 
being available all the time, the translator is left 
with a choice: either to refuse the job or to learn 
about ways of coping with this challenge. 
The use of electronic corpora, monolingual and 
both parallel and comparable, together with the 
relevant corpus managers or Internet search 
engines can provide considerable help. In their 
book Working with Specialized Language, 
A practical guide to using corpora, Lynne Bowker 
and Jennifer Pearson explain in detail how LSP 
corpora can be used as a translation resource. 
Students can follow their explanations and create 
small ad hoc corpora to investigate usage, style 
                                                                             
the importance of competence in the target language will be 
stressed and a short test in Czech will inform the students of 
the level of their Czech. The core of the course consists of the 
translation of various types of texts and the discussion of 
different translation procedures and techniques. The 
theoretical basis will be supplied. Literature: J. Levý, Umě ní 
překladu; S. Bassnett, Translation Studies; P. Newmark, 
Textbook of Translation 
 
11
 Simona Mazacova : Translating humour can be an 
extremely rewarding, yet at the same time an extremely 
difficult task, as humour is more easily recognised than 
analysed or reproduced. This seminar is going to examine 
humour as a specific category which is closely tied not only to 
language, but also to culture, mentality and historical context; 
look at different types of humour and perhaps attempt a small 
“cross-cultural study” on the differences between Czech and 
Anglo-Saxon humour. Above all, however, we will try to 
TRANSLATE humour and for this purpose the seminar will 
employ not only literary texts but also jokes, cartoons, adverts, 
drama, films or TV programmes. There will also be some 
space for the students to contribute their own favourite 
humorous texts. 
 
and search for explanatory contexts in dealing with 
terminology. Here are some key points they give: 
• “A corpus can provide you with both 
linguistic and conceptual information. 
• You can consult a parallel corpus in 
much the same way as you consult a 
bilingual dictionary, but a corpus will 
provide more collocational and stylistic 
information than a dictionary. 
• A monolingual corpus can also be used 
as a translation resource, but you have to 
be more creative in devising strategies to 
find equivalents. 
• You can also use monolingual corpora to 
help you choose between synonyms, 
identify usage information and 
determine what style is appropriate for 
your translation.” 
Although more time is devoted to translations into 
Czech, students also translate into English and get 
acquainted with the above-mentioned techniques. 
They are assigned tasks in terminology extraction 
and management. To work on these projects they 
used MultiTrans
12
 and Bonito
13
. 
Bonito is a corpus manager developed by 
Pavel Rychly of the Faculty of Informatics, 
Masaryk University in Brno. The students have 
been using Bonito to search corpora, including a 
Czech-English parallel Corpus that was developed 
at the Faculty of Arts
14
. 
Another part of the training in “Becoming a 
Translator” was to simulate a translation agency. 
The students were asked to work with the free 
Personal Edition (PE) version of Transit
15
 to 
translate a text into English. I used Transit 
Professional and Term Star to prepare translation 
projects for them. These projects (.pxf format) 
were based on revised translations and included 
reference material for concordance searches and 
also the required terminology. The students 
uploaded their translations in .txf format in 
Moodle. 
 Apart from language skills and mastering 
new technologies, working as a translator also 
involves dealing with clients, agencies, employers; 
networking, research, use of technology; and 
generally an awareness of the roles translation 
plays in society and society plays in translation 
(Robinson, 1997). Students were therefore exposed 
to real-life situations and met experienced 
translators who told them about their work. They 
                                                 
12
 http://www.multicorpora.ca/multitransoverview_e.html
13
 http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projects/bonito/ 
14
 http://www.phil.muni.cz/angl/ 
15
 http://www.star-solutions.net/html/eng/support/Transit-
SAT-PE.html
also followed discussions on the Internet on 
various lists for translators and attended lectures, 
directly or on-line. Recently Power-Point 
presentations of such lectures have been uploaded 
in Moodle. 
It follows from what has been said that 
translation teachers should be educated as 
translators and teachers as well. This background 
should make it possible for them to pass on the 
knowledge and skills they have acquired. It helps if 
the translation teacher is an IT expert as well. To 
mention some personal qualities – I believe that 
teachers in general, but translation teachers in 
particular, should be open to discussion, definitely 
not dogmatic, and willing to learn all their lives. 
On the other hand, patience and pedantry, up to a 
certain degree, is a must to be able to instil basic 
rules and responsibilities of the profession in the 
students. 
5 Conclusion 
The aim of this paper was to provide information 
on courses in translation theory and practice, based 
on current teaching experience, using the course 
management system called Moodle. 
I think that the instruction has changed for the 
better due to the new technologies. Other questions 
spring to mind – how is it possible that the quality 
of translations is not getting better, too? Is there a 
limit to what can be learned? We will have to wait 
and see to be able to make a statement about that. 
In conclusion I would like to say that creating 
web-based materials and using authentic materials 
is an exciting and rewarding activity but also a 
never-ending adventure likely to “swallow” most 
of the teachers’ leisure time. There is some hope, 
however, that once this groundbreaking work has 
been done, more time can be devoted to improving 
the courses and making them work without a hitch. 
6 Acknowledgements 
My thanks go to all my colleagues, friends and 
family who have contributed to the creation of my 
courses and to Dan Miksik, the Moodle 
administrator in particular. Last but not least, also 
to past and present students for their patience when 
they have to put up with the whimsical nature of 
computer technology and their teacher’s 
enthusiasm, rather than mastery of its various ins 
and outs. 

References  
Somers Harold (ed.). 2003. Computers and 
Translation: A Translator’s Guide. 
Amsterdam/Atlanta. John Benjamins, pages XV, 
349.  
Learning Management Systems for the Rest of Us; 
An assessment of open source learning 
management systems. A research report 
presented by CUE (Corporate University 
Enterprise, Inc.), May 1, 2003. 
Pym Anthony, Fallada Carmina, Biau José Ramón, 
Orenstein Jill (eds). 2003. Innovation and E-
Learning in Translator Training. Tarragona: 
Intercultural Studies Group. 
Pym Anthony. E-Learning and Translator 
Training. 
http://www.ice.urv.es/trans/future/cttt/research/el
earning.pdf
Bowker Lynne, Pearson Jennifer. 2002. Working 
with Specialized Language, A practical guide to 
using corpora. p.193, Routledge. 
Robinson Douglas. 1997. Becoming a Translator, 
p.146, 192. Routledge. 
Neunzig Wilhelm. 2002. How to educate students 
without coming face to face with them or 
Information technologies in the teaching of 
translation on a distance-learning basis. 
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