Abstract:

Given their modelling character, textual genres have long been used in schools and high schools as a didactic tool for developing oral and written skills in one's own language. Besides, socio-discursive interactionism has demonstrated the usefulness of working with genres also in the teaching of foreign languages at all levels. Focusing on the university context, in Translation studies, practice with different textual genres has been integrated into the curriculum of language and translation courses for years, and both the definition and characterization of genres and textual types from different perspectives receive a great deal of attention from the research community.

In the particular case of specialized translation, there are a number of specialties (e.g. medical or legal translation) that are covered in the syllabuses of all Translation and Interpreting schools, but given the large number of professional activities that exist, it is impossible to cover them all in one Degree. Therefore, translators interested in specializing in translations in other economic sectors of interest, such as the wine industry, must resort to workshops, courses and other forms of non-formal education. These courses tend to have a markedly practical nature and are mainly aimed at providing professionals with new tools and strategies that will enable them to expand their work activity quickly and without going into disquisitions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the benefits of applying a genre-based approach to translator training beyond the university classroom. To this end, we take as an example a wine-focused translation workshop where the maxim "you learn to translate by translating" - which seems to predominate in this type of training - has been replaced by a methodology that proposes the observation and description of wine genres as a preliminary step to the translation of this sort of texts. The implementation of this methodology in two editions of the workshop has produced satisfactory results: the participants activated mental models that enabled them to better solve the proposed exercises and highlighted the usefulness of the genre analysis proposed, which they also found extensible to other fields of specialization.

Keywords:

Specialized translation, text genres, non-formal education, winemaking, text analysis.