ISSN: 1579-9794
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
Lecturers’ Overall Comments in the Specialised
Translation Classroom: Focus and Discursive Strategies of
Written Corrective Feedback
Los comentarios globales de los docentes en el aula de
traducción especializada: focos y estrategias discursivas
de retroalimentación correctiva escrita
GEMMA ANDÚJAR MORENO
gemma.andujar@upf.edu
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
MARIA DOLORS CAÑADA PUJOLS
mariadolors.canada@upf.edu
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Fecha de recepción: 06/09/2023
Fecha de aceptación: 08/02/2024
Abstract: Despite its formative value, research on feedback in translation
teaching is relatively scanty. Generally, the written corrective feedback that
university students of translation receive comes primarily from their lecturer
and may take a variety of forms. The present study centres around overall
written comments, which the lecturer appends to the translation before
returning it to the student. Here, a corpus was created consisting of the overall
comments written by four lecturers at three different Spanish universities on a
total of 48 student-written sworn translations. The corpus was then analysed
in terms of the focus of the feedback as well as its form. Attention was paid to
elements such as type of speech act conveyed by the comment, and the
courtesy or mitigation strategies it entailed. The results show that the written
feedback provided in the form of overall comments corresponded to a
unidirectional teacher-to-student model of communication, the predominant
speech acts being praise and criticism. In addition, comments tended to focus
on the quality of the sworn translation and did not address the translation
process. These findings point to the need to rethink the characteristics of the
feedback provided by translation lecturers in order to maximise its usefulness
in the teaching-learning process.
Keywords: Feedback, Overall comments, Sworn translation, Translation
training
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Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
Resumen: La investigación sobre retroalimentación en didáctica de la
traducción es relativamente escasa, pese a su importante valor formativo. Por
lo general, la retroalimentación correctiva escrita que se ofrece a los
estudiantes de traducción procede del profesorado y puede adoptar diversas
formas. El presente estudio analiza los comentarios generales escritos que el
profesor añade a la traducción antes de devolvérsela al estudiante. Para ello,
se creó un corpus compuesto por comentarios generales escritos de cuatro
profesores pertenecientes a tres universidades españolas en un total de 48
traducciones juradas realizadas por estudiantes. A continuación, se analizó
el corpus en función tanto del enfoque del comentario como de su forma. Para
ello, se prestó atención a elementos como el tipo de acto de habla expresado
por el comentario y las estrategias de cortesía o atenuación que conllevaba.
Los resultados muestran que la retroalimentación escrita que se proporciona
en forma de comentarios generales correspondía a un modelo de
comunicación unidireccional profesor-estudiante, con el elogio y la crítica
como actos de habla predominantes. Asimismo, los comentarios tendían a
centrarse en la calidad de la traducción jurada y no abordaban el proceso de
traducción. Estos comentarios apuntan a la necesidad de replantear las
características de los comentarios que ofrecen los docentes para maximizar
su utilidad en el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje.
Palabras clave: Retroalimentación, Comentarios generales, Traducción
jurada, Didáctica de la traducción
INTRODUCTION
Translation training in higher education has not been exempt from
recent attempts to foster an approach to assessment that goes beyond its
purely certifying function to incorporate a formative purpose as well (Kiraly,
2000; Kelly, 2005; Hurtado Albir, 2019). Constructivist approaches argue that
assessment is inseparable from the learning/teaching process: it should not
only be applied by the lecturer to monitor the student’s learning process but
must also be oriented to the student’s self-regulation. In short, assessment
must be perceived as a central element in the learning/teaching process
(Hortigüela et al., 2019).
One of the fundamental pillars of formative assessment as it is generally
understood is feedback, in most instances lecturer-generated. It could be
defined as a specific form of guidance whose aim is to facilitate for the student
the construction of knowledge and the self-regulation of their learning process
(Espasa Roca & Meneses Naranjo, 2010). Together with the quality of
instruction (Darling-Hammond, 2000), feedback as a scaffolding practice
constitutes one of the most crucial factors in the learning/teaching process
(Hattie, 1992).
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Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
For feedback to be formative, it is not sufficient to be student-centred,
meaningful, and offered at the appropriate moment. It is also essential that the
student demonstrates previously “the understandings, capacities and
dispositions needed to make sense of comments and use them for
enhancement purposes” (Carless & Boud, 2018, p. 1316). Therefore, to be
effective, feedback must not be unidirectional from teacher to student; rather,
dialogue and reflection on the part of all participants are critical.
In the context of the learning/teaching of translation, one of the chief
pathways for feedback available to the lecturer is the assessment of student-
produced written texts. This task is by no means a simple one given the
subjectivity inherent in the act of assessing the quality of a translation, despite
the understandable desire on the part of most lecturers to design and apply
assessment systems that are as objective as possible (Conde Ruano, 2009;
Orozco-Jutorán, 2006). In the present study1 we will concern ourselves with
evaluative comments written by lecturers as part of the feedback they provide
to students in specialised translation courses, and more specifically with the
field of sworn translation, for reasons which we will explain below.
1. SWORN TRANSLATION IN TRANSLATION TRAINING
Sworn translation has been defined in Spain as the official translation
of documents of any sort or content, carried out by professionals who are duly
certified to do so by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the
European Union, and Cooperation. The special nature of this sort of
translation can be seen in the designation ‘sworn’ given to the translator who
is certified to perform these tasks, the official nature of the translations they
carry out, and the civil and criminal liability assumed by the translator when
she/he affixes her/his signature and seal, thereby authenticating the
translation of the document in question. In terms of form, the sworn translation
must fulfil a very specific set of requirements about the seal, signature,
formula, and proof of authenticity of the original document to be translated.
Sworn translation represents an attractive professional career for those
with a university degree in translation because it entails greater social prestige
and higher remuneration than most other careers open to those with a degree
in translating. These considerations fully justify the inclusion of activities
centred around sworn translation within the curricula of degree programs in
translating and interpreting at Spanish universities, either as part of courses
in legal translation or as courses exclusively devoted to this specialisation. In
such courses, the standard practice is for students to receive assignments in
1 This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant
PID2020-113236GB-I00 (RetroTrad: Formative feedback in translation teaching and learning).
4 Lecturers’ overall comments in the specialized translation classroom […]
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
which they are told to translate some sort of official document as if they were
already active professionals duly qualified to practise in the current market
(Andújar Moreno & Cunillera Domènech, 2017). The resulting student-
produced translations are then scrutinised and assessed by their lecturers
before being returned to the students. During the process of scrutiny, lecturers
are generally expected to write or otherwise affix marginal comments to the
student-produced text. These comments may be either narrowly focused on
certain aspects of the text, or of a more overall nature, referring to the text as
a whole. In the present study, we will analyse specifically the second sort of
comment mentioned above, namely overall comments.
2. RESEARCH ON FEEDBACK IN TRANSLATION `PEDAGOGY
Though there is evidence of the formative value of feedback for the
acquisition and development of translation competence (Göpferich, 2013;
Massey & Brändli, 2016), there is as yet little empirical research on this
practice. One of the pioneers in analysing the use of feedback in the training
of translators is Dollerup (1994), who argued that formative feedback should
be a mix of written annotated corrections of student-produced translations,
oral commentaries about the various possible solutions to the problems posed
by translations, and the use of specific critique forms on which the strengths
and weaknesses of a particular student text can be noted. Various other
feedback-related topics have aroused the interest of researchers, among
them the use of feedback in online translation teaching (Neunzig & Tanqueiro,
2009), the beliefs and perceptions of lecturers and students regarding the
feedback that they respectively give and receive (Mikolič Južnič, 2013), and
the uses of peer feedback (Wang & Han, 2013), positive feedback (Conde
Ruano, 2016), group feedback (Pietrzak, 2017), and corrective written
feedback (Washbourne, 2014), including the modalities in which this latter can
be provided (Andújar Moreno & Cañada Pujols, 2020).
In translation teaching, the paradigm has tended to be articulated
around group commentary in the classroom on translations done previously
by the students outside the classroom (Kiraly, 2000, p. 24; Cañada Pujols &
Andújar Moreno, 2021, p. 370). The modality of the formative assessment that
results from this interaction is largely oral, as the lecturer or students identify
the errors in student-produced work, explain their causes or consequences,
and discuss alternative solutions critically. Nonetheless, written feedback on
student translations plays a significant role in their training, consistent with the
importance placed on this sort of feedback in higher education in general
(Agricola et al., 2020).
In written formative feedback, the lecturer’s comments could be defined
as communicative acts of didactic intervention in student-written texts (Tapia,
Gemma Andújar Moreno y Maria Dolors Cañada Pujols 5
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
2016, p. 70). They constitute the lecturer’s reactions to the student’s
translation manifested in the form of annotations of varying length, either
hand-written or inserted in a text file using a word-processing program, in
which the lecturer responds to various aspects of the student-produced text.
When they are broad in focus, the comments refer to the text as a whole and
not to one specific element in it:
Figure 1. Example of a comment in the upper margin2
Source. Corpus extract
Overall, comments of this sort tend to be written at either the beginning
or end of the translation, and their length depends on their content. More
narrowly focused comments, on the other hand, deal with specific aspects of
the translation and tend to be written along the margins of the text or, in the
case of a digital file, inserted by the lecturer at a specific location in the text
(Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005; Goldstein, 2006; Christiansen & Bloch, 2016). We
will focus here on overall comments, because full exploration of narrowly
focused feedback would require a much lengthier analysis, given the
abundance and variety of such comments provided by lecturers. Moreover, it
is the overall feedback that is claimed to be more likely to stimulate students
learning given its “potential to ‘feedforward’ into future tasks rather than back
to completed assignments” (Carless, 2006, p. 225).
In overall comments, both the form and focus of the message being
delivered by the lecturer play a key role in inducing reflection and learning on
the part of the student (Dawson et al., 2019). Conrad and Goldstein (1999)
draw a distinction between direct comments, which openly express their
function (e.g., “Please reformulate this passage”), and indirect comments,
whose intention is more implicit (e.g., “It would have been useful to reformulate
this passage”). Both types of comments influence student motivation, because
2 “In general, very good work. Pay attention, however, to the errors you have made. Grade:
8.75/10” (our translation).
6 Lecturers’ overall comments in the specialized translation classroom […]
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
they generate an emotional response that determines the degree to which the
student will engage with the feedback by taking active steps to self-regulate
(Way, 2019). It is, therefore, necessary to study the form, and focus of written
comments in the context of translation, either general or specialised, to see
how its formative character might be strengthened, thereby leading to
improvements in both teaching practices and learning processes.
3. LECTURER DISCOURSE
The classroom is a social context where students and lecturers interact
through language. The sort of language that is generated in situations of
teaching/learning in an academic context is called classroom discourse, and
its features may differ in form and function from other types of oral interaction
(Martín-Peris et al., 2005). Research on classroom discourse from the
perspective of sociocultural theories takes as its starting point the premise that
the oral interactions, that take place in such contexts, have a possible impact
on learning (Thoms, 2012). Nonetheless, not all the discourse that occurs in
a classroom is based on oral interaction. In fact, comments that a lecturer
makes on evaluable activities are also a type of classroom discourse and can
be regarded as a pedagogical genre (Arancibia Gutiérrez et al., 2019). Tapia-
Ladino et al. (2016, p. 245) argue that written corrective feedback forms part
of an “interwoven dialogic interaction”, given that “by turning in their written
assignments, the students initiate a conversation with the lecturer in which the
latter replies by means of comments”3. It would therefore seem necessary to
analyse these comments from a linguistic-discourse perspective to determine
their function. As noted by Antón González (1999) a real understanding of
lecturer discourse, in this interaction should enable us to make the discourse
a more effective instrument to enhance the student’s learning process.
The theories of pragmatics best suited to the purpose of defining the
functions of lecturer discourse are, in our view, Austin’s (1975) speech act
theory and Searle’s (1969) illocutionary acts theory, which centre around
speakers’ intentions. There exist various classifications of speech acts, but a
full discussion thereof lies outside the scope of this paper, so we will limit
ourselves instead to the traditional distinction between direct and indirect acts.
Direct illocutionary acts are those in which the utterance produced by
the speaker signals, explicitly and literally, what is being expressed. By
contrast, indirect illocutionary acts are those in which, besides the
propositional component, a complementary meaning is conveyed (Searle,
1969). In classifying these acts, we will rely on the typology set forth in Albelda
Marco et al. (2014, pp. 49-51) whereby there are four illocutionary categories
3 Our translation.
Gemma Andújar Moreno y Maria Dolors Cañada Pujols 7
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
of speech acts encompassing the full set of communicative intentions, namely
to direct, to assert, to commit, and to express. At the same time, our analysis
will bear in mind the concept of politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987),
understood as the set of all discursive strategies whose goal is to avoid or
mitigate the tensions that may arise during the interaction. We will also refer
to the various attenuation phenomena (Briz Gómez & Albelda Marco, 2013)
which may appear in lecturer discourse.
4. DATA CORPUS AND METHODOLOGY
The corpus was made up of all lecturer comments on 48 examples of
student-produced sworn translations, provided to us by four lecturers teaching
courses in legal translation from French to Spanish or Catalan, as part of
Translation and Interpreting degree programs at three Spanish universities.
The lecturers all have advanced university degrees in the field of translation,
and three of them are professional sworn translators. In all cases, these
courses were being offered to students in their third or fourth year of the
degree program.
The number and source of each of the texts making up the corpus can
be seen in Table 1.
Lecturer University
education Profile Sworn
translator University
Number of
student-produced
translation texts
Percentage
of total
1 PhD
Translation Academic Yes A 10 20.8
2 PhD
Linguistics
Academic/
Professional Yes B 11 22.9
3 PhD
Translation
Academic/
Professional Yes C 12 25
4
Master’s
degree
Translation
Academic/
Professional No A 15 31.2
Total 48 100%
Table 1. Source university and number of student-produced translations
Source. Elaborated by the authors
The original texts in French translated by the students were documents
certifying the completion of university degree programs or other academic
achievements (e.g., diplôme de maîtrise, diplôme d’études approfondies,
diplôme de licence). They were texts that accredited information of an
academic nature whose purpose was to satisfy administrative requirements
outside the country of issuance. The task assigned to the student to be carried
8 Lecturers’ overall comments in the specialized translation classroom […]
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
out outside the classroom was to produce what would pass for a sworn
translation if they were themselves fully certified freelance sworn translators.
The grades they received on this assignment constituted a stipulated fraction
of the overall grade they would receive for the course (summative
assessment). Students were not explicitly required to revise or correct their
translations once they had been graded. Thus, the lecturer provided written
feedback on what was essentially a final textual product.
The first step in the analysis consisted of identifying all instances of
overall feedback comments. Using the QDA Atlas-ti software, these
comments were then coded according to their focus (Derham et al., 2021) and
the pragmatic-discursive dimension of the lecturer’s discourse. Following
Hattie and Timperley (2007), the focus of each comment was categorised as
pertaining to one of four levels, namely task, process, self-regulation, or
person. The pragmatic-discursive level of analysis was related to speech acts
conveyed in the comments and the discursive strategies applied. Finally, we
triangulated the data using the results of a brief questionnaire (see Appendix
1) answered by the lecturers. The questionnaire consists of four open-ended
questions which aim to collect information on how lecturers justify their
feedback practices. The lecturers' answers were compared with the results of
the analysis in order to detect overlaps and divergences.
Our three research questions were as follows:
• Do the lecturers use overall comments to provide written
corrective feedback on these translations?
• What are the focal areas of these overall comments?
• What pragmatic-discursive strategies do the lecturers rely on in
their overall comments?
5. RESULTS
In the following sections, we will set out the results of our analysis to
answer the research questions.
5.1. General Quantitative Data
We identified 69 overall comments in the 48 student-produced sworn
translations. This total is broken by the lecturer in Table 2.
Lecturer
Number of student-
produced translations
Number of overall
comments by lecturer
1 10 10
2 11 20
Gemma Andújar Moreno y Maria Dolors Cañada Pujols 9
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
3 12 24
4 15 15
Total 48 69
Table 2: Number of overall comments per lecturer
Source. Elaborated by the authors
The distribution of comments across lecturers shows two tendencies,
with lecturers 1 and 4 offering relatively fewer comments (10-15), and
lecturers 2 and 3 offering somewhat more (20-24). Lecturers 1 and 4 wrote
only one overall comment per assignment (as we will see below, on many
occasions the comment amounted to simply indicating a grade), while 3 and
4 typically wrote more than one per assignment, either at different locations
on the page or writing more than one in the same location. Figure 2 illustrates
an instance where the lecturer has written two overall comments at the end of
the document, separating them from the student’s sworn translation by means
of a line, and separating the two comments from each other through initial
dashes.
Figure 2. Example of two overall comments by lecturer 34
Source. Corpus extract
The picture we get of each lecturer is consistent with the answers
provided on the questionnaire: all the lecturers write overall comments on all
student assignments in the corpus. The reason they do so is, in the words of
lecturer 2, “so that the student can get feedback about the overall quality of
her or his translation.” The lecturers feel that the use of overall comments is
essential if “the aspiring translator is to understand [his weaknesses] and be
self-critical” (lecturer 4). Such comments will have a positive impact on the
learning process, in their view, because “in subsequent assignments, most
4 “This does not fulfil the assignment requirements because it does NOT constitute a sworn
translation” / “Several serious errors make this translation unusable” (our translation).
10 Lecturers’ overall comments in the specialized translation classroom […]
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
students tend not to repeat the same errors that have been pointed out to
them (and commented on) in previous assignments” (lecturer 1).
Regarding the location of the overall comment on the student text,
lecturers 1 and 4 noted that they usually write their comments at the end of
the student translation to distinguish them from more specific comments.
Lecturers 2 and 3 did not provide any information in this respect, although in
the corpus it was found that they usually write them at the beginning of the
translation.
In all cases, the focus of the comment is the task, not the process,
self-regulation, or person, and the comment may or may not be accompanied
by a grade. As shown in Figure 3, while lecturer 1 wrote only overall comments
and never noted the grade the student had received, lecturer 4 always
accompanied the grade with a comment, while lecturer 2 always separated
grades from comments, and lecturer 3 generally wrote more than one
comment on each paper, so comments were not always accompanied by a
grade. Thus, the data do not reveal any special tendency in lecturer behaviour
in this respect.
Figure 3. Combination of overall comments with grades
Source. Elaborated by the authors
From the lecturers’ responses to the questionnaire, for most lecturers
the key factor determining whether a grade should be included or not is simply
that it is a graded assignment, because “the grade is taken into account when
it comes to calculating the student’s overall grade for the course” (lecturer 3).
Of the four lecturers, only lecturer 1 simply writes a grade at the end of the
Gemma Andújar Moreno y Maria Dolors Cañada Pujols 11
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
student text, without comment because “during the term I focus more [in class]
on explaining errors and their consequences to help the students judge for
themselves whether their translations are valid or not, and why,” thus obviating
the need for such explanations to be written on student assignments.
5.2. Discursive Features of Overall Comments
Setting aside the input from lecturer 1, who writes only a grade on
student translations, there are 35 instances of lecturer-written overall
comments in our corpus, whose contents can be broken into three main
speech acts, in the proportions displayed in Table 3.
Speech act Number of comments (% of total)
Praise 17 (48.5%)
Criticism 15 (42.8%)
Warning 3 (8.7%)
Total 35
Table 3. Types of speech acts performed by lecturer comments.
Source. Elaborated by the authors
Lecturer comments are generally speech acts offering praise, followed
closely by those conveying criticism. Only a small fraction of comments can
be classified as warnings. The breakdown by individual lecturer is shown in
Table 4.
Lecturer
Speech act
Praise Criticism Warning Total
1 0 0 0 0
2 3 5 0 8
3 8 4 0 12
4 6 6 3 15
Total 17 15 3 35
Table 4. Types of speech acts broken down by lecturer.
Source. Elaborated by the authors
The lecturers clearly have individual tendencies. Lecturer 1 refrains
from writing any overall comments whatsoever on student papers, limiting her-
12 Lecturers’ overall comments in the specialized translation classroom […]
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
or himself to indicating the grade received. Lecturer 2 writes a few overall
comments, most of them critical. Lecturer 3 tends to give praise rather than
criticism, whereas lecturer 4 shows a balance between praise and criticism
and is the only lecturer to proffer warnings.
Regarding the focus of the overall comments, lecturer 1 reported that
her/his comments addressed issues such as “requirements of the
assignment,” “appropriate formatting for a sworn translation,” “spelling and
grammar,” “terminology,” or “translation techniques and strategies.” Lecturer
2 claimed to focus on “the overall quality of the translation as if it were a
real-life sworn translation job.” Lecturer 3 referred to “the linguistic quality of
the translation” and whether the student had respected “the formalities of a
sworn translation.” Finally, lecturer 4 reported that her/his overall comments
covered “all sorts of aspects, from translation-related ones to the process I
deduced that the student had followed in documenting their work.”
In the next section, each speech act identified in the corpus–praise,
criticism, and warning–, will be examined in greater detail.
5.2.1 Praise
The overall comments in this category correspond to a positive
evaluation of the quality of the translation, always expressed directly (Albelda
Marco et al., 2014, p. 51). They are characterised by being synthetic: the
lecturer limits her- or himself, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, to
brief compliments (e.g., lecturer 4: “good work;” lecturer 3: “great work”). The
focus is always the “work,” a generic lexical unit that can allude to, either the
product or the translation process.
The lecturer’s approval of these expressive speech acts is conveyed in
all cases by means of value-loaded adjectives like good or excellent,
sometimes preceded by an intensifier. When the sworn translation warrants
special recognition for its high quality, the lecturer may reinforce the praise
with a congratulatory expression (e.g., lecturer 3: “excellent work.
Congratulations!”, or “very good job. Congratulations!”). At once expressive,
polite, and evaluative, the congratulatory speech act is conveyed through the
marker of illocutionary force congratulations, which implies recognition of the
student’s face (Briz Gómez & Albelda Marco, 2013, p. 307).
5.2.2. Criticisms
The 15 criticisms identified in the corpus represent a type of speech act
in which a negative opinion is asserted (Albelda Marco et al., 2014, p. 50).
Through them, the lecturer transmits a negative judgement motivated by an
error or omission in the sworn translation, invalidating the official text as a
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Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
whole. In six of these examples, the criticisms take the form of assertive
negative statements in which the illocutionary force of the message is
unattenuated, as illustrated by (1) and (2) below.
(1) “The requirements of the assignment have not been met
because this is not a sworn translation.” (Lecturer 2)
(2) “The final text does not fulfil its function.” (Lecturer 2)
The negative orientation is made clear in these examples through the
verbs meet and fulfil and negative forms with not. The use of objectifying
devices such as the passive in (1) or making “the final text” the subject of the
sentence in (2) is intended to put distance between the lecturer and the
student.
About areas of focus, the unattenuated direct criticisms tend to revolve
around formalities related to the seal, the certification formula, or confirmation
of the authenticity of the original document. These overall comments therefore
negatively evaluate the validity of the translation as an official document.
Criticisms can be attenuated by various discursive devices. In (3),
lecturer 3 addresses the student by his name to mitigate the impact that an
overall negative assessment of the translation is likely to have on the student’s
self-image.
(3) “Alex, you have tried to make the text sound too natural and in
these sworn translation assignments you can’t do that, especially
with the names of degrees.” (Lecturer 3)
The lecturer attenuates the critical force of her/his message, involves
the student in his/her assessment, thereby reducing the distance between
them. The focus of (3) is on process of sworn translating, and the excessive
weight attached to the target administrative culture when it comes to
translating cultural references from an administrative context. This is one of
the main difficulties due to conceptual asymmetries between the two
languages.
Another attenuating strategy, used by lecturers, is to precede a criticism
by praise (9/15 instances). In such cases, the comment consists of a first
utterance in which the lecturer evaluates the quality of the translation
positively by ranking it on a gradient good‑bad or correct‑incorrect scale,
sometimes preceded by an intensifier. This is followed by a second utterance
which points to specific errors or aspects that could be improved, which qualify
the initial praise. The two utterances are joined by counter-argumentative
connectors such as although, but, or however. These lexical units present the
second utterance as a suppressor or limiter of some of the possible inferences
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Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
that may be triggered by the first. The praise always precedes the criticism,
indicating that it is intended as a strategic politeness device to attenuate the
criticism in order to protect the student’s face. This can be seen in (4) through
(7) below.
(4) “Good, although some elements are inexact, which should be
borne in mind next time.” (Lecturer 4)
(5) “In general, good, but it is essential to avoid serious errors.”
(Lecturer 4)
(6) “The translation as a whole is well executed. However, the few
errors you have made are serious (undergraduate vs. Master’s
degrees/some information from the information is missing), and this
greatly diminishes the value of the work.” (Lecturer 4)
(7) “Very good work, but given the requirements of the assignment,
you should have been more precise in your translation of the name
of the university degree.” (Lecturer 3)
In (4) and (5), lecturer 4 points to several areas for improvement by
generic lexical items with negative connotations, such as inexact and errors.
In (6) and (7), the lecturer is more specific about the type of error that has
elicited her/his admonition. In the first case, the translation of specialised
terminology and lack of information, and in the second, an error in the
translation of the name of a university degree which proves that the student is
applying a method of translation too focused on the target administrative
culture and thus inappropriate for a sworn translation. Once more, the
feedback revolves around terminology and the translator’s method.
In examples (4) through (7) we also see the use of evaluative adjectives
and verbs (e.g., serious, diminish, essential, more careful) and modal verbal
forms related to obligation (should be, should have been), which refer to
instructions given by the lecturer and her/his role as an authority. But this
obligation is mitigated by depersonalization (e.g., “should be borne in mind,”
“it is essential to”) to save the student’s face.
The lecturers tend to highlight areas where improvement is especially
important by using the explicit warning marker be careful, as we see in (8).
(8) Good overall, but be careful to avoid the errors you have made.
(lecturer 4)
In this speech act, the lecturer addresses the student to draw her/his
attention to the translation errors she/he has made.
Gemma Andújar Moreno y Maria Dolors Cañada Pujols 15
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
5.2.3. Warnings
It will have been noted that the preceding example included a warning,
inserted into a criticism, when the errors spotted by the lecturer were, in her/his
view, of gravity. Two other examples were identified in which a warning
constituted the overall comment itself.
(9) “Be careful to avoid being imprecise.” (Lecturer 4)
(10) “Be careful to avoid the errors you have made here.” (Lecturer
4)
In accordance with their illocutionary force, warnings are considered
here directive speech acts intended to benefit the student, because they
provide information that the warner believes will be of assistance to the
recipient (Albelda Marco et al., 2014, p. 50). Just as we have seen in the other
overall comments, the lecturer resorts to generic terms like imprecise and
errors in her/his feedback.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
In the present study, we have empirically analysed a corpus of overall
written comments made by lecturers on student-produced translations which
were required assignments in courses forming part of undergraduate degree
programs in translation at three Spanish universities. The assignment was to
simulate preparing a sworn translation of an official document, a sort of
assignment that is typical in the translation classroom.
Our analysis has allowed us to answer our first research question in the
affirmative: the use of overall comments on student-produced sworn
translations is indeed a common form of corrective written feedback in the
specialised translation classroom. From the domain of second language
teaching, Ferris and Hedgcock (2005) and Jamalinesari et al. (2015)
recommend the use of a combination of overall and specific comments for
feedback on student work, noting that the value of the former lies in the fact
that they allow both lecturer and student to view the text as a whole and
prioritise what is most important. As we have seen, three of the four lecturers
conform to this recommendation, reporting that they combine qualitative
comments with other modalities of written corrective feedback which fall
outside the scope of this study.
Various empirical studies on formative feedback have demonstrated
that descriptive feedback has a greater effect on improving student work than
grades. As noted in works such as Black and William (1998), Yorke (2007), or
Butler and Shibaz (2014), because it dominates the attention of students,
grading tends to limit the formative potential of comments as a scaffolding
16 Lecturers’ overall comments in the specialized translation classroom […]
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
instrument. Thus, when given only a grade, many students focus their
attention on that and do not bother to check their errors to learn from them.
Similarly, if both grade and feedback are given to the student, the student’s
attention is likely to be dominated by the grade at the expense of the feedback.
Only when feedback is provided without a grade will the student focus fully on
it. In the corpus, overall comments with qualitative assessment,
unaccompanied by a grade, are relatively rare, with only one of the four
lecturers failing to apply this practice. Although our sample size was
admittedly small, the results obtained here allow us to claim that grading still
seems to be the majority tendency.
At the same time, we have seen that feedback in the form of an overall
comment corresponds to a model of communication that flows unidirectionally
from lecturer to student, and not a dialogic model as proposed by various
authors (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006; Nicol, 2010). The student-produced
translations seen here constitute final products to be graded, and the students
are not explicitly asked to revise or rewrite their text, meaning that in effect the
lecturer is assessing a finished work. Hence, lecturers’ overall comments are
not oriented towards the improvement of future work, but rather centre around
the quality of the product as it stands, without regard for the possible actions
that the student could take to assimilate and apply the feedback received.
With regard to our second research question, we have seen that all the
overall written comments are related to the quality of the student’s product, an
observation that coincides with the findings of Dirkx et al. (2019), and Derham
et al. (2021). This product-centred feedback does not address methodological
aspects of the translation, such as the documentation process or the revising
of drafts, which are of fundamental importance to fostering the learning that
will be transferable to other sworn translation assignments of a similar nature.
A closer examination of the discursive dimension of the data has
revealed that their focus cannot be separated from the speech acts in which
they are framed. A correlation can be seen between the orientation of the
evaluation expressed in the speech act (positive for praise, negative for
criticism) and the degree of precision in the lecturers’ use of terms to refer to
the aspects of the work that are being judged. While in the praising comments,
the focus is always expressed through the generic term work, feedback
offered in the form of criticism is more specific and error-oriented. In the latter
instances, frequent allusion is made to the formalities proper to a sworn
translation because the lecturer is assessing in her/his overall comment the
text’s validity as an official document. The specialised terminology of the
academic context and a method of translation excessively oriented to the
target administrative culture are aspects that also frequently elicit overall
Gemma Andújar Moreno y Maria Dolors Cañada Pujols 17
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
comments and are therefore issues to which the lecturer attaches special
importance.
These foci of attention in the feedback, also pointed to in lecturers’
responses to the questionnaire, are related to the very specific features of
sworn translation. Working on these elements in the classroom through the
design of specific activities more narrowly focused on how to plan a sworn
translation would in turn result in an improved learning process.
As for the third research question, our analysis of speech acts has
revealed that instances of praise and criticism are rather evenly distributed in
frequency, with warnings coming a distant third. Thus, the variety of speech
acts present in lecturer comments is limited: we see no instances, for
example, of questions, requests for more information, or suggestions, which
would be particularly useful to foster the dialogic component of feedback
(Washbourne, 2014).
Several studies have pointed out that the excessive use of indirect
speech acts can make feedback less effective because it may be difficult for
students to decode the true intention of the discourse (Carless, 2006). This
issue does not arise in our corpus, where the lecturers express praise,
criticism, or warning in a direct fashion, with greater or lesser degrees of
attenuation.
Giving praise is an expressive, polite, and evaluative speech act which
is expressed in our corpus in a highly synthetic manner. The instances seen
here are not accompanied by any information which might help the student
understand the reasons for her/his success (expressed by the grade), hence
the possibility of transfer to other translation assignments is greatly
diminished. It can be hypothesised that the reasons for the praise are fleshed
out in the specific comments the lecturer makes elsewhere in the text.
It is true that, in the teaching of translation or any other discipline,
positive feedback constitutes a valuable tool to foster self-esteem, motivation,
and student involvement in the feedback they receive (Conde Ruano, 2016;
Pitt & Norton, 2017). However, “positive comments without directive guidance
do not provide advice which makes action possible. All students, including
those with high marks, require feedback which enables them to enhance
future work” (Derham et al., 2021, p. 10). Indeed, there seems to exist a
consensus among both lecturers (Lipnevich & Smith, 2009) and students
(Gamlem & Smith, 2013) that generic praise of this sort contributes little to
improving student learning. Praise that is more focused would therefore serve
better to project the feedback towards the future by reinforcing the learning
already acquired.
18 Lecturers’ overall comments in the specialized translation classroom […]
Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
Criticisms constitute speech acts that voice a negative opinion. When
they express themselves without attenuation, the lecturers use negative
assertions and resort to the passive to produce a distancing effect and
objectivise the criticism. When the criticism is attenuated, it is often preceded
by a compliment as a politeness strategy. In short, there can be perceived as
desire to convey objectivity on the part of the lecturer, which is particularly
noteworthy given the fundamental subjectivity inherent in translation
assessment (Conde Ruano, 2009). In light of the use they make of attenuation
in their discourse, the lecturers here appear to be conscious that the way
comments are expressed can have a negative impact on student
self-confidence and self-esteem (Carless, 2006), and, consequently, they
seek to avoid this.
We are aware that this study has certain limitations. First, in the interest
of keeping it homogeneous, we have analysed a relatively small sample, in
terms of both the number of lecturers and the number of student-produced
translations. Second, we have restricted our analysis to the overall comments,
with the result that the overview obtained of written corrective feedback is
perforce only partial. These results need to be complemented by an analysis
of the lecturers’ specific comments, given that students receive both types of
feedback on any given assignment.
Despite these limitations, this research has clear implications for
translation teaching in educational contexts. We believe that our findings invite
lecturers to reconsider the feedback they provide students not just in terms of
form and focus, but also in terms of its utility in helping the student to develop
her/his competence as a sworn translator. We have seen here that the
provision of feedback through overall comments is unidirectional and that the
lecturers did not apply a strategy that would force the student to reflect on
her/his sworn translation. It is not enough for feedback to be a mere
transmission of information. As has already been done in other disciplines,
further work must be done that addresses the issue of how students make use
of feedback and what consequences that use has thereafter, since “to be
effective, feedback needs to be meaningful, understood and correctly acted
upon” (Ajjawi & Boud, 2017, p. 254). In translation teaching, considerable
research remains to be done in this direction.
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APPENDIX 1. LECTURER QUESTIONNAIRE
1. When you evaluate a sworn translation in writing, do you usually
indicate the student’s grade for the assignment? Why or why not?
2. Do you usually write any overall comments evaluating the text,
either at the beginning of the student’s sworn translation or at the
end? Why or why not?
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Hikma 23(2) (2024), 1 - 25
3. If you write overall comments on the text, what aspects (whether
translation-related or otherwise) do you usually mention in them?
4. Do you believe that overall comments have any impact on student
learning?
