Abstract:

Today, due to the COVID-19 crisis, traditional education, including university education is undergoing radical changes giving ground for new approaches, for example, e-learning. E-learning provides us with a number of opportunities to either modify the traditional teaching methods or create brand new ones. For example, integrating e-learning into the traditional teaching process has the following advantages: new technologies, including clouds, optimize time management making education process more flexible and mobile, using new interactive instruments makes teaching more illustrative and lessons more interactive. The present research focuses on testing a new approach to teaching translation during the COVID crisis - using cloud services to update the traditional teaching experience.

To optimize teaching translation, we need to clearly understand the requirements that the future specialist will have to meet. Requirements, as a rule, are put forward by a potential employer. All requirements can, in our opinion, be grouped as follows: “interpreters do not know their native language well”, “interpreters do not know their way around the proposed subject area”, “interpreters do not know how to use modern technologies to optimise their work”. Our article is going to discuss the way modern technologies can be used to improve interpreters’ training.

As for the cloud instruments used to teach translation, they include:
• online text editor
• cloud-based communication platform
• text corpus (British National Corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English, Russian National Corpus, etc.)
• web-based reference materials, including online resources providing information about different language aspects (grammar, style, etc.) (web-based dictionaries: Longman Dictionary Online, Macmillan Dictionary Online, etc; British Council, English Tips, Englisch Hilfen, etc.)
• online dictionaries (both bilingual and monolingual) (web-based dictionaries: Longman Dictionary Online, Macmillan Dictionary Online, etc).
• CAT toold (Trados, SmartCAT, etc.)
The participants were 100 fourth-year students majoring in translation studies. They all had had theoretical and practical courses in oral translation and were instructed by teachers on how to use cloud tools during lessons. The feedback was received using semi-structured interviews, reflective essays and reports’ analysis.

As for the advantages distinguished by our respondents, they include:
• Modernising the approach to teaching translation studies;
• New opportunities provided by the software used (role-playing, editing texts in real-time);
• Using special software, for example, teaching students to use CAT tools.

Speaking about the disadvantages, the following ones were enlisted:
- One needs some time to adapt to new methods of teaching;
- Lack of visual contact (especially the eye-to-eye contact) at webinars.

All things considered, we can say that the world is changing radically and new challenges require new approaches to teaching translation. We suppose that elements of e-learning should be introduced into university teaching, for example, new technologies can be used to train professional translators, while cloud technologies, in our opinion, can be called the cutting-edge instrument for teaching translation. Using cloud technologies can help us to optimize and improve different aspects of traditional learning, making it more interactive and effective.

Keywords:

Cloud service, cloud, translation, online teaching.