Lecturers’ Overall Comments in the Specialised Translation Classroom Focus and Discursive Strategies of Written Corrective Feedback
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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.
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