Interpreter training pedagogical models

a cursory review for beginners

Abstract

The multiplication of interpreter training programmes at Masters and even PhD levels has created room for training and recruitment of young PhD graduates to serve as trainers in such programmes. This paper compiles and reviews a number of pedagogical theories and models for interpreter training. These theories and models are likely to help young trainers in interpreter training programmes choose approaches that best suit their various training contexts. The paper stems from the fact that most newly recruited trainers are young PhD graduates with little or no experience in pedagogical issues in general, pedagogy in higher education institutions, and more specifically interpreter training pedagogy. Yet, over the years 2010s- 2020s, interpreter training institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Advanced School of Translators and Interpreters (ASTI) in particular, embarked in the new global trend of academizing interpreter training institutions by making them more research-oriented. This option gave birth to a new generation of trainers-educationists-researchers having as main limitation their little acquaintance with pedagogical principles to support their mission. It is in a bid to help upcoming interpreter trainers give an orientation and some theoretical grounding to their training activity that the following theories and models were gathered from the literature, critically discussed and put together, with the hope to ease their teaching endeavor as beginners. The paper does not claim to be exhaustive, neither does it suggest that the theories and models it reviews are applicable as such in all training contexts. It therefore trusts the capacity of younger and other colleagues to be innovative and rely on the reflections discussed hereunder only as mere options they are.