Assessing how closely postgraduate translation programmes fit the reality of professional practice: a case study of the Spanish context

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an empirical descriptive and contrastive study designed to assess how closely postgraduate translation programmes fit the reality of professional practice. Focusing on medical translation, the case study analyses the convergences and divergences between the competences that professional medical translators deploy in their work and highlight as being essential and those that students are expected to acquire in postgraduate courses in which medical translation is taught. Two empirical studies were conducted. The first study focused on a socioprofessional perspective: 167 English-to-Spanish medical translators were surveyed to obtain information about their profiles and their opinions on the competences needed for medical translation. The second study focused on an academic perspective: the syllabuses of postgraduate courses in which medical translation is taught in Spain were analysed to determine the competences students are expected to acquire. The results of these two studies, which are analysed, compared and discussed, show that there are a significant number of convergences, but also some divergences, between the university courses and the professional practice. These raise interesting questions which need to be taken into account when designing, planning and improving existing and new postgraduate courses. Keywords: competences, gap between the profession and academia, medical translation, postgraduate programmes, professional translators. 'translators with a scientific-medical background' (TSBs). The questionnaire consisted of 47 questions, the majority of which were closed. These were grouped into three blocks:  Academic and socio-professional profile, which included questions about training received, clients, genres and topics translated, difficulties encountered, resources used, years of experience, and tasks performed, among others.  Competences, where respondents had to assess the importance of a given list of competences on a 1-to-5 Likert scale. To this end, we developed a framework of competences based on: (1) the results of the interviews conducted with medical translators in the qualitative exploratory study (Muñoz-Miquel 2014); (2) literature reviews on translation competence models (

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