A sight translation contest as a tool to identify common student difficulties in translating economics texts

Abstract

Relevance. Sight translation of business documents and news is widely used in today’s business communication. Unfortunately, this type of translation is often overlooked in university curricula. Sight translation is seen as a mere step towards simultaneous interpretation and is skipped. However, it is this type of translation that we need to focus on, as a large number of translation errors are reported in real-life situations. Materials and Methods. We analyzed and aggregated available data from open sources: university website posts about the student contest, surveys of contestants, interviews with organizers and judges, qualitative and quantitative analysis of the most common difficulties (emotional, cognitive and motor challenges) and presented our experience with the organization of the student translation contest at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, Oditsovo Campus. Results and Discussion. We categorized the typical errors made by the participants. The errors can be purely linguistic, caused by insufficient language skills, and extra-linguistic (emotional, cognitive and motor). The most important reasons for making errors are low stress resistance, lack of attention, insufficient understanding of the subject matter and, as a consequence, poor understanding of the context, insufficient knowledge of special terminology, and missing intra-sentence references. Conclusion. The research shows that a sight translation contest is an effective tool for identifying and preventing common difficulties that students may have in translating specialized texts.