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<Paper uid="W04-1405">
  <Title>Technology-enhanced Translator Training</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="2" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 History and New Developments
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Fifteen years ago, before the Velvet Revolution  , 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 &amp;quot;forbidden&amp;quot; topics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 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 &amp;quot;approved&amp;quot; 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> But after 1989 sweeping changes occurred.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 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.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="1" end_page="2" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.1 Translators
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> 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  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. &amp;quot;Mother tongue&amp;quot; is sometimes no longer so easy to establish and is therefore called the &amp;quot;language of habitual use&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1">  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.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> 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  .</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> However, as Anthony Pym explains in his paper on E-Learning and Translator Training, we should &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot; 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  http://www.edutools.info/course/compare/index.jsp enhance the teaching rather than substitute the teacher-student and student-student interaction in the classroom.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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