Training the Experts in Medical Translation 

By Marga Navarrete, Alejandro Bolaños and Mazal Oaknín (SELCS Centre for Translation Studies / Spanish Portuguese and Latin American Studies)

Update: The open-access e-book based on this seminar is now available for perusal here! See the end of the blog post for the full reference for this book.

This e-seminar on medical translation came out as the 7th edition of our e-Expert seminar series in Translation and Language Teaching, a collaboration between UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) and the University of Cordoba, Spain, which started in 2018 and has since caught enormous attention worldwide.

Through different national and international mailing lists, we reached hundreds of prospective attendees – teachers, lecturers, researchers, PhD students and professionals from translation and publishing industries, from modern language and translation departments and in secondary and higher education in the UK and overseas.

Our seminars devote a special emphasis to the areas of curriculum design, assessment and feedback, interdisciplinarity and EDI challenges. We dedicated our previous series to current perspectives and applications in audiovisual translation, recent advances in pedagogical translation, mediation and culture, media accessibility, LGTBQI+ understanding, feminism and gender and our next one, taking place in 2025, will be “Tackling the BIPOC awarding gap”.

Our e-seminar in medical translation followed a two-day format :13^th of June and 12^th of September 2023, both took place in UCL at the Institute of Advanced Studies’ Common Room (IAS, London’s Bloomsbury Campus).

Online attendance was provided via a Zoom Webinar as we strive to promote presential and remote participation, therefore accessibility has been ensured by coaching our keynote speakers on how to make their presentations accessible to neurodivergent audiences. These are initiatives that we have done in the past and that have been very warmly received in hybrid format.

Most importantly, attendance to our e-seminars has always been offered free of charge. However, over the years we managed to get some limited funding for our events, including the funds from the IAS and the Centre for Humanities Education.

Our June and September events were divided into the following categories:

• Individual talks by keynote speakers followed by Q&A sessions on a range of topics aimed at training practitioners in both translation and pedagogical translation (for language learning purposes) such as how and why to teach crisis translation in the context of health and the principles on teaching medical translation and interpreting for international organisations. As a novelty, a recent special issue of the Spanish medical translation journal Panace@ was discussed by its guest editors.
• Two workshops: The first one for language and translation tutors wishing to carry out situated medical translation experiences in the classroom; and the second one, on Sketch Engine, an application based on the study of corpus linguistics.
• A roundtable with experts followed by a Q&A session in which keynote speakers, experts, attendees and organisers interacting whilst contributing to a more informal discussion.

UCL’s Dementia Research Centre constituted the perfect opportunity for this roundtable to serve as a platform of their work, which has already appeared in the Institute of Translators and Interpreters’ Bulletin and is steered by Dr Olivia Cockburn (MA Director, Centre for Translation Studies). This well-established partnership has attracted considerable attention from the School and Faculty and is likely to become a long-term teaching initiative that follows principles that are similar to the Portfolio scheme put forward by members of this committee at SELCS/CMII.

Our series has already reached over a thousand attendees worldwide, including Latin America and Asia. We have grown consistently, and we had 287 attendants registered for this event (increasing from 90, 100, 167, 221, 236 and 161 in the previous six e-seminars). Following the feedback received, we are confident that our 7th e-seminar has generated a great deal of enthusiasm and participation has been boosted even further.

All talks were recorded live so as to be included in an ISBN-registered e-book soon to be published by UCO Press, Spain. Our post-seminar e-books allow us to disseminate our seminars beyond UCL and our partner university. Ultimately, our aim is for colleagues to embrace newer teaching approaches and materials when reviewing language and translation curricula.

Needless to say, all this work would have not been able without the support of our host institutions UCL and our international partner – the University of Cordoba.

For further information on our previous editions please check our page here.

Follow us on Twitter @eExpertSeminarS for any updates on future events!

Steering Committee:  Dr. Alejandro Bolaños, Dr. Marga Navarrete and Dr. Mazal Oaknín (UCL), Dr. Soledad Díaz Alarcón and Dr. Azahara Veroz (University of Cordoba). 

References

Training the Experts in Medical Translation, edited by M. Azahara Veroz-González & Alejandro Bolaños García-Escribano (2024). E-Expert Seminar Series: Translation and Language Teaching series. ISBN: 978-84-9927-803-2.