Abstract:

Currently both Academia researchers and Higher Education Institutions (HEI) administration acknowledge there is a strong necessity within the Higher Education Area to foster and systematize links between education and research.
Both scholars and university teachers underline the importance of training students to analyze their learning practice and future profession-related activities. Such training can combine classroom and self-study activities. Both formats are aimed at developing students’ knowledge, skills and abilities to search for different strategies and tactics for problem solving, to compare them and identify the best solutions.

As far as classroom activities are concerned, sustainable links between education and research within the university –based training require collaborative and problem-based learning environments that can be hardly built basing upon the traditional educational classroom formats.
The new student generation of the information society requires innovative approaches to using well known educational methods, technologies and tools. In the third millennium information society these approaches have to focus on students’ abilities to create, distribute, interpret bilingual information for the purposes of education, research and professional development.

Our field of research and teaching practice is legal translators and interpreters’ training at the University level.
Taking into account the above tasks, we would like to focus on the Think Aloud protocol that has been proved to be one of such tools to bridge education and research in the process of translators’ training.
The Think Aloud protocol is a form of empirical research that means asking people to think aloud while solving a problem. The resulting verbal protocols (fixed in written or with the special software) are analyzed by researchers to identify peculiarities of reasoning during a problem solving process. Using this method it is possible to identify the information that is focused on during problem solving process, to perceive the trajectories which are chosen by the individual to facilitate problem resolution.
In particular, this method is used to analyze cognitive aspects of translation process. Until now days this method has not been used in translation skills training, for practical educational purposes.

Nevertheless our experimental teaching has revealed that Think Aloud Method can be used in legal translation skills training in the classroom. While thinking aloud and verbalizing individual thoughts , students compare each other’s ways of searching for the best translation variant, their peers’ arguments and translation product results. This collaborative learning with the focus on problem solving task enables students to both fix their thoughts, analyze them later on and exchange opinions on thinking strategies and translation solutions provided. At the same the listed steps contribute to developing students’ analytical and critical skills, research abilities regarding translation process.

The report provides comments on the experimental training methodology, students and teachers’ opinions and respective data regarding obvious success of those students whose training was based on Think Aloud approach. Special emphasis is laid on the specific requirements to educational aids that have to be developed to use Think Aloud approach.