Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relation of professional theoretical knowledge and practical skills in the process of training intending translators, interpreters and teachers of foreign languages. Finding a balance of theoretical and practical constituents of education remains a serious problem of modern education. The authors discuss their empiric experience of combining theoretical background and practical skills, and present their understanding of the issue in professional linguists’ training.

The paper describes the curriculums successfully introduced at the Higher School of Foreign Languages and Translation, Kazan Federal University, Russian Federation and analyses the case. This paper reports on the results obtained via observation, product analysis and survey among students.

The authors suggest that finding a reasonable balance of theoretical and practical in professional linguistic education is important for educating both academically and with reference to the modern labour market. On the one hand, understanding the theoretical background of language, translation and methods of teaching is the obligatory condition of the academic character of university education, which is supposed to be research based. On the other hand, nowadays employers expect to hire specialists with a wide range of practical skills relevant to the job.

The curriculums combine two wide groups of academic linguistic subjects. The first one includes disciplines related to the theory of language, translation and methods of teaching languages, which makes a conceptual peculiarity to professional linguistic education in contrast to short-term courses in language schools. The second group of subjects consists of disciplines presupposing practical training of linguistic, translation and teaching skills. Thus, language acquisition is carried out according to the modern communicative approach, but with more profound, professional understanding of language phenomena. The bases of translation studies are introduced via lectures; however, the nature of translation activity presupposes much practice, therefore subjects related to translation mostly include practical classes. Teaching skills are developed through practical application of knowledge, which is possible due to the balanced division of academic hours.

The conclusions represented in the paper are based on the specifics of combining theoretical and practical constituents in training linguists, as both have their important role in the university education, which presupposes different tasks, methods, forms, resources and materials used. The results are supported by the data obtained via the students’ opinion survey. The respondents were asked about their preferences concerning the curriculum, which is important in terms of independent evaluating of education quality. The practical value of the paper is in an effort to identify the ratio of theoretical and practical in professional linguistic education, though the importance of both constituents is out of question.

Keywords:

Linguistics, student, school, theoretical konowledge, practical skills, academic, course, translator/interpreter, teaching nethods.