Abstract:

Recognizing continuities between two cultural contexts is possible by using culturally responsive and sustaining teaching/learning strategies, also translated into Transcultural Education. To find out to what extent such innovative strategies could be acknowledged in Romanian translation and interpreting studies nowadays, I conducted a study during the last three months of 2020 on teaching and learning experiences, using two questionnaires, addressed separately to teachers and students of the Translation and Interpreting Study Programme, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Politehnica University of Timişoara, Romania.

The questions in both questionnaires referred to teaching and learning strategies and working methods used in class and unassisted to broaden the students’ intercultural horizons, in an attempt to discover if an upgrade of the translation and interpreting studies through innovative culturally responsive and sustaining teaching strategies is possible.

At the end of the 3-year study we expect our students, future translators and interprets, to be already mentally prepared to step back and re-evaluate their own socio-cultural heritage, seeking a more objective self-insight through an unbiased, broad-minded perspective, which allows them further to analyse cultural differences, to acknowledge their legitimacy and eventually to create coherence between two socio-cultural realities. Culturally responsive and sustaining teaching strategies could be, in my opinion, successfully adopted in the theory and practice of translation and interpreting studies, as they plead for diversity and foster the development of continuities between cultures, culture-specific behavioural patterns and semiotic systems. The students are encouraged to identify and compare cross-cultural similarities and differences. Thus, the gap between two different cultures is bridged and the students have the freedom and opportunity to go back and forth between the different cultural contexts as much as they want and need. The focus is no longer exclusively on the studied foreign culture and civilization, ignoring the students’ cultural heritage during the teaching process, on the contrary, the students are encouraged to find similarities and also differences between the two sociocultural realities, to acknowledge both systems’ values and to absorb the multicultural information. Eventually, both cultural heritages and perspectives will be regarded as equally important and relevant to the learning process, and the context analysis will be approached biculturally.

Keywords:

intercultural awareness, cultural bridging, intercultural communicative competence, socio-cultural realities, transcultural education, digital society