Teaching Translation during COVID-19 Outbreak: Challenges and Discoveries

Abstract

The present paper addresses translation teaching during the COVID-19 outbreak, seeking to discover the challenges translation teachers encounter in online education and the solutions available to resolve them. Its importance springs from the fact that teaching almost all over the world had to depend on distant teaching/learning through electronic platforms to face the pandemic of COVID-19. Therefore, the present study seeks to discover the challenges encountered in online translation teaching and the proposed solutions to overcome them. It intends to answer the following questions: how does teaching translation during the COVID-19 outbreak look like? What are the challenges encountered in teaching translation during the COVID-19 outbreak? What are the discoveries found in teaching translation during the COVID-19 outbreak that may serve as advantages/solutions for the challenges faced? The paper uses a comprehensive questionnaire containing closed-ended and open-ended questions to elicit quantitative and qualitative data from sixty translation teachers. The data shows that 40% of the participants evaluate their online translation teaching experience during the COVID-19 outbreak as enjoyable. In contrast, no participant has assessed their online translation teaching experience as not good. About 23.33% of the participants consider their online translation teaching experience very good, and the same percentage applies to those who evaluate their online translation teaching experience as good to some extent. Thus, around 13.33% of the participants consider their online translation teaching experience good. The data also indicates that most participants have encountered obstacles in online teaching and have concurrently proposed solutions to resolve them.