The potential effect of conceptual maps on developing translation students' encyclopedic knowledge

Abstract EN

This paper purports to give a special attention to teaching specialized translation in higher education.

Thus, translation is by nature a problem solving activity and reposes on a complex set of skills, which creates a load on their short-term memory and prevents them from grasping information or remembering it later.

Translators need not only linguistic competence, but encyclopedic knowledge as well.

In specialized translation, they need to acquire a declarative competence about the specialized field with which they are dealing, and this is a problem that should not be reduced to knowledge of terminology.

Students need to immerse themselves in the domain and acquire an aptitude to express themselves in the given field of specialty using a near-specialist discourse after acquiring the necessary encyclopedic knowledge.

A constant contact with text translation in the domain does not guarantee the development of such competence, as students need more support in this respect.

In this paper we suggest the use of concept maps prior to embarking in the translation activity per se as a means to enhance students' encyclopedic knowledge and hence translation competence.