Instructional model in teaching translation and interpretation: A case study

84 Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University – No. 3(15) 2015 – August/2015 
INSTRUCTIONAL MODEL IN TEACHING TRANSLATION 
AND INTERPRETATION: A CASE STUDY 
Pham Vu Phi Ho 
Ho Chi Minh City Open University 
Email: ho.pham@ou.edu.vn 
(Received: 22/06/2015; Revised: 03/08/2015; Accepted:14/08 /2015) 
ABSTRACT 
Recently the teaching activities that correspond to the material used in the translation and 
interpretation classes at Ho Chi Minh City Open University (HCMC OU) haven’t satisfied the 
students’ needs and interests due to monotonous activities. The Faculty of Foreign Languages of 
HCMC OU is seeking for an innovation. The study aims to investigate if the new model applied 
to training students of this subject is effective. The design of this study is based on the existing 
problems to seek for an innovative method rather than dealing with theoretical issues in this 
field. 125 undergrad students who registered for the 50-hour-course of translation and 
interpretation at HCMC OU participated in the study. The training models were classroom 
activities, dubbing voice in Video clips, and final project of translation. The study provides 
innovative activities that the instructor/researcher applied for the translation and interpretation 
classroom and measures the effectiveness of the training models. The study sets guidelines for 
the instructors at HCMC OU to use extra activities to help students improve their skills in 
translation and interpretation classes. 
Keywords: Course-book, dubbing voice, projects translation, task activities. 
1. Introduction 
Translating is often hard work for both 
lecturer and students, especially those who are 
novice in translation areas. Students often 
have a lot of difficulties in translating 
activities because of their limits of 
vocabulary, grammatical structure, cultural 
issues, knowledge of the translating texts, 
even the problems of their own mother tongue 
language. Yet, the lecturer also has his or her 
own difficulties in explaining each translated 
version that relates to collocation, context 
knowledge, or cultural issues. And there is no 
single translating version for each text. The 
possibilities of translation might be various 
that sometimes it’s hard to explain which 
one/sentence should be the most appropriate 
translated version. Another problem for the 
novice translators is that of the influence of 
the mother tongue language. The novice 
translators often base on the structure of the 
source language (SL) to translate into the 
target language (TL). Hence, the structure of 
the translated version is often of the structure 
of the source language which is not what the 
translators are supposed to do. The other 
problem occurred in the translation courses 
was that most of the activities in the 
classrooms at the Faculty of Foreign 
Languages were correcting the translated texts 
 Instructional Model In Teaching Translation And Interpretation: A Case Study 85 
of homework for the students. This seemed to 
be limited in terms of classroom activities. 
There should be some innovation in the 
instructional models to help make the learning 
activities more effective. 
 In my own professional context at the 
Faculty of Foreign languages at HCMC OU, 
when I asked the students to translate an 
English text into Vietnamese version, I 
realized that the students did not use skills of 
pre-reading or scanning the content before 
they conducted their translation, they just took 
each sentence and translated sentence by 
sentence (personal communication, 2013). To 
confirm my view on this issue, I asked them 
to translate the reading of “The Power of 
holding hands” extracted from a book of 
“Chicken soup for the soul” used in the 
course-book material. I found that the students 
just read the title and translated it, and read 
each sentence to translate without any prior 
reference to the whole content of the reading. 
For example, the title of the reading is “The 
Power of Holding Hands,” the students 
translated as “Sức mạnh của nắm tay.” After 
translating the whole text, the students were 
explained clearly the meaning of the content 
of the reading text. Then I asked them to re-
consider the title and translated it again based 
on the content that I instructed them to do 
translation. One group of the students in the 
classroom changed their first translated 
version as “sức mạnh của tinh thần đoàn kết.” 
This translated version was much better than 
the first one because it was based on the 
content of the reading and based on the 
culture of the target language, Vietnamese. 
Besides, the Translation-Interpretation 
courses are compulsory subjects at the Faculty 
of Foreign Languages at Ho Chi Minh City 
Open University (HCMC OU). Training 
students to do translation and interpretation is 
always a challenge to instructors at HCMC OU. 
Razmjou (2003) claims that theoretical 
knowledge and practical skills alone are not 
adequate to prepare students in this field. Only 
a sophisticated and systematic treatment of 
translation education can lead to the 
development of successful translators. Searls-
Ridge’s (2000) argues that good translators are 
made, not born. This indicates that the 
translators, especially novice translators need to 
work a lot in order to deal with the texts when 
they conduct their translation/interpretation. 
During the translating activities, Melby 
and Foster (2010) suggest that the context of 
the source language is of importance which 
really affects translation and they define 
context as five factors which are relevant to 
the understanding of source text and the 
production of target text such as co-text, 
chron-text, rel-text, bi-text, and non-text. 
First, the co-text of a word or phrase is limited 
surrounding text within a particular version of 
one document but not limited to the current 
sentence. Second, the term chron-text means 
the chronological changes in a source text, 
which includes keeping track of different 
versions of a text and what edits were made at 
each stage. Third, rel-text refers to translation 
which is almost always necessary to consult 
not only the document being translated but 
also related documents and other resources. 
Fourth, bi-text is a bilingual resource. In other 
words, documents are re-translated in a 
comparison of various ways to translate the 
same document. Finally, non-text refers to 
aspects of context that are not accessed 
through written texts during a translation 
process. They might include technical 
knowledge and cultural awareness about the 
subject matter of the source text. 
Furthermore, to do research on a 
translation course, Takeda (2010) trained 
students with an 8-week course of Research 
on Interpreting to help students become 
familiar with the key milestones, concepts and 
recent trends in Interpreting Studies and to be 
initiated into basic research methods and 
approaches. The first four weeks of the course 
86 Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University – No. 3(15) 2015 – August/2015 
was dedicated to reviewing and discussing the 
main concepts and issues in Interpreting 
Studies. The subsequent four weeks of the 
course was used for student presentations. At 
the end of the course the students were 
required to submit a research proposal, an 
action research report, a research report, or a 
critical review of previous literature. In 
addition to individual consultations with the 
teacher, students utilized feedback from their 
colleagues during their in-class presentations 
to finalize their submissions. The study found 
that first students seem to be very interested in 
the process of interpreting, especially 
strategies to deal with specific challenges in 
interpreting. Second, students seem to be 
sensitive to directionality and language 
competency issues, and feel that a long-
established universal curriculum may not 
serve well to address specific needs in specific 
language combinations. Finally, students 
seem to be very interested in whether what 
they are taught is in line with the market 
reality. The study brought an idea to the 
researcher of the current study that 
encouraging students to conduct projects or 
reports is an important activity to enhance 
instructional effects and improve students’ 
language competency. 
Relating to the context of the current 
study, Le Thi Thanh Thu et al. (2012) 
investigated the graduates’ status (academic 
year 2004-2008) from the English faculties of 
eight universities in Ho Chi Minh City. To the 
graduates who majored in translation and 
interpretation, the study found that 66.7% of 
them asserted that the training curriculum 
only provided them with medium knowledge 
and skills, and they were not quite confident 
in their professional knowledge. They 
complained about the inadequateness of 
credits and knowledge offered for this major. 
In addition, the study revealed that most of 
universities did not have faculty 
staff/instructors who specialized in translation 
and interpretation in order to help students do 
their translation and interpretation tasks 
professionally. 
Teaching activities that correspond to 
the material used in the translation and 
interpretation classes at HCMC OU haven’t 
satisfied the students’ needs and interests. 
Pham Vu Phi Ho and Phu Thi Kieu Bui 
(2013) conducted a survey to explore 
students’ attitudes toward the training 
programs in this major and found that the 
HCMC OU students were not equipped 
enough knowledge and language proficiency 
for the translation/interpretation skills. Their 
problems in translation and interpretation 
include language issues and lacking of 
translation–interpretation strategies. In terms 
of materials and teaching methods, the 
students were not satisfied because of out-of-
date information and monotonous teaching 
methods. For these reasons, the Faculty of 
Foreign Languages of HCMC OU is seeking 
for an innovation. Therefore, the study aims to 
investigate if the new model applied to 
training students of this subject is effective. 
First, I explored the translation strategies 
employed by the students during the 
translating activities; then I explored the 
students’ attitudes towards the collaborative 
activities that I applied in the classroom to see 
if this helped students to learn from one other. 
I finally asked the students to evaluate the 
activities of dubbing voices into video clips 
after translation. These activities were 
supposed to be a motivating model in teaching 
translation courses at the Faculty of Foreign 
Languages at HCMC OU. These purposes 
were hypothesized in the forms of the 
following research questions. 
Research questions 
1. What strategies do the HCMC Open 
University students employ during 
the translation processes? 
2. What are the students’ attitudes 
towards the collaborative activities in 
 Instructional Model In Teaching Translation And Interpretation: A Case Study 87 
translation? 
3. Do the activities of translating and 
dubbing voices into the Video clips 
motivate students in the learning 
processes? 
2. Methodology 
Pedagogical setting and samples 
The study was conducted in three intact 
classes of translation and interpretation at 
HCMC Open University (HCMC OU). 125 
undergraduate students who registered for 
these courses participated in the study. Before 
participated in this study, the students were 
trained one course of translation and 
interpretation (45 periods). This course of 
translation and interpretation training lasted 
for 15 weeks; each meeting lasted 3 periods 
(50 minutes/period). The instructor/researcher 
used the course-book of translation and 
interpretation - 2 designed by senior lecturers 
at HCMC OU. Other additional materials 
were also provided to the students such as 
VOA Special English - Economics and 
Education Reports, and English songs. The 
training models were translation and 
interpretation and doing projects. More 
description about the instructional models and 
project assignments will be presented in the 
following session. 
Instructional Model 
Course-book and activities in the 
classroom 
The course-work was designed with 
task activities. Every week the students were 
assigned to complete some parts of the 
textbook in which sentence structures and 
grammatical patterns were set up and then 
posted their translation version onto the green-
board. The students were competitive to be 
selected as volunteers by raising their hands 
after the announcements were delivered by the 
instructor/ researcher. In addition, the students 
were randomly put into groups of four to help 
one another learn and did the translation 
together. They were asked to translate all 
tasks from the textbook as the normal 
curriculum. The translation would be one part 
of the big project submitted at the end of the 
course. 
The students were instructed to do the 
translation with following considerable issues. 
First, the novice translators should read and 
understand the meaning of the source 
language of the text before doing any 
translation. With this issue, the translators 
were supposed to conduct a lot of reading to 
obtain the knowledge of the related areas. 
Cultural issues were also considered. Second, 
any translated version from English to 
Vietnamese should be for Vietnamese readers 
who did not know much of English. 
Therefore, the language of the Vietnamese-
translated version should be used for 
Vietnamese readers, and the structure of 
Vietnamese version should be of the 
Vietnamese language structure, not of the 
English - structures. This required the novice 
translators to obtain good knowledge of their 
own mother tongue language. Finally, for 
whatever translating theories or strategies that 
the students applied in their translation 
activities, making sense of the translated 
version for the target language readers, 
remaining the original meaning of the source 
language, should be conducted. This required 
the novice translators to apply different skills 
and theories of translation into their work. The 
main purpose is to help the readers have a 
feeling that that translated version is similar to 
that of the local language writers’. 
Additional assignments to the course 
Apart from the translation activities 
conducted in the classroom as described in the 
above session, the students were challenged to 
do additional assignments. First, the 
instructor/researcher sometimes let the 
students listen to an English song three times 
and asked them to translate the meaning of it. 
Totally three English songs were added to the 
training which were downloaded from 
88 Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University – No. 3(15) 2015 – August/2015 
Youtube website. One was “Tell Me Why” 
sung by Declan Galbraith; one  ... ranslation processes, items 6 – 9 
investigated the students’ attitudes towards 
the effectiveness of translation activities with 
groups, and items 10 – 15 examined the 
motivation of dubbing voices into video clips. 
These questions were designed in the 6-point 
Likert’s scale. The responses of the students 
on these questions were analyzed by the SPSS 
vs. 20 to test the mean scores of each item 
(descriptive statistics). The Cronbach’s Alpha 
of reliability analysis reached at .835. 
4. Findings and discussion 
Research question 1: What strategies do 
the HCMC Open University students employ 
Classroom 
Activities 
• Correction of translation of the textbook 
• Translation of some English songs 
• Translation of some Economic Reports 
• Group Interpretation of Economic Reports 
• Strategies of translation were introduced to the students. 
Video Clip 
Project 
• Translated from English to Vietnamese and Dubbed voice 
• Translated from Vietnamese to English and Dubbed voice 
Final project 
• Translated The Textbook 
• Translated One American Literature Work 
• Translated Four Economic Reports 
• Submitted video clips 
90 Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University – No. 3(15) 2015 – August/2015 
during the translation processes? 
In order to respond to research question 
1, items 1 to 5 relating to students’ strategies 
used during the translation processes. The 
criteria for the Likert-type scale ranged from 1 
(strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) were 
set as follows: low evaluation: 1 – 2.66; 
medium evaluation: 2.67 – 4.33; and high 
evaluation: 4.34 – 6. Table 1 presents the 
students’ translation strategies. 
Table 1. Students’ translation strategies 
 Descriptive Statistics 
No. Translation strategies N Mean 
Std. 
Deviation 
1 
When translating a sentence or a paragraph of a text, you 
conducted your translation word-for-word based on the meaning 
of the source language. 
125 3.56 1.15 
2 
Whenever you translated a text, you read carefully the whole 
paragraph to understand its meaning, then you translated into 
Vietnamese. 
125 4.72 1.11 
3 
When translating the text, you first translated the text based on 
the meaning of the original onto a draft, then transferred the 
structure of the English to the Vietnamese. 
125 4.00 1.24 
4 
As usual, when you translated a text, you often read and 
translated part-by-part without connecting them to the whole 
context. 
125 4.23 1.19 
5 
As usual, when translating a text, you often read the whole text 
before translating it. 
125 4.33 1.13 
Table 1 reveals that not many students, 
(1) when translating a sentence or a paragraph 
of a text, translated word-for-word based on 
the meaning of the source language (M = 
3.56; SD = 1.15). This indicates that the 
novice translators overcome their styles of 
translation and applied new strategies in their 
translating activities after obtaining the 
training. This might come from the classroom 
activities when the instructor/researcher 
explained and provided comments on their 
translated version based on the new 
instructional model (Fig. 1). Bassnett (2005) 
advised translators to avoid word-for-word 
renderings when they translated one language 
into another. Hatim and Munday (2004) state 
that word-for-word substitution is not a solid 
base for translation. However, (2) most of the 
students confirmed that whenever they 
translated a text, they read carefully the whole 
paragraph to understand its meaning, then 
they translated into Vietnamese (M = 4.72; 
SD = 1.11). This indicates the students made 
use of the strategies of translation trained by 
the instructor during the course. In other 
words, the students used the context for 
translation rather than word-for-word 
translation. Melby and Foster (2010) asserted 
that context played the key role in a 
translation process. Luther (1963 cited in 
Munday, 2008) rejected word-for-word 
translation because the translated version was 
unable to convey the meaning of the source 
language and sometimes incomprehensible. 
Also, (3) some students reported that 
when they translated the text, they first 
translated the source language based on the 
meaning of the original onto a draft, then 
 Instructional Model In Teaching Translation And Interpretation: A Case Study 91 
transferred the structure of the SL to the TL 
(M = 4.00; SD = .93). This strategy came 
from the instructor/researcher who repeatedly 
told the students that a good translation 
version should be in Vietnamese structure 
rather than English structure. 
Some students reported that (4) as their 
habits, when they translated a text, they read 
and translated part-by-part without connecting 
them to the whole context (M = 4.23; SD = 
1.19). However, some stated that (5) they 
often read the whole text before they did 
translation (M = 4.33; SD = 1.13). Although 
these two questionnaire items were not highly 
evaluated, the mean scores of the latter was a 
bit higher than that of the former indicating 
that the students attempted to connect part of 
the text to the whole context to understand 
and convey the original meaning of the SL as 
much as they could. 
Research question 2: What are the 
students’ attitudes towards the collaborative 
activities in translation? 
Items 6 to 9 in the questionnaire relating 
to students’ attitudes towards the effectiveness 
on the collaborative translation activities were 
analyzed to respond to this research question. 
Table 2 presents the students’ attitudes 
towards the collaboration activities in 
translation. 
Table 2. The effectiveness of Collaborative Translation Activities 
No. 
Translating activities with groups N Mean 
Std. 
Deviation 
6 
Thanks to collaborative translation activities, I learned a lot of 
knowledge from one another. 
125 4.91 0.97 
7 
I found that the activities of translating the textbook and 
economic reports, then sharing with other group members 
helped me improve my knowledge. 
125 4.75 1.15 
8 
I found that doing project in group during the course helped me 
learn a lot of vocabulary as well as translation skills. 
125 4.72 0.97 
9 
Apart from translating the exercises in the textbook, translating 
from 4 to 5 economic reports helped me enhance my necessary 
vocabulary. 
125 4.54 1.04 
As can be seen from table 2, in general, 
the students highly evaluated the activities of 
collaborative translation. (6) Most of the 
students agreed that they learned much from 
one another due to collaborative translation 
activities (M = 4.91; SD = .97). In addition, 
the students strongly agreed that (7) the 
activities of translating the textbook and 
economic reports, then sharing with other 
group members helped them improve their 
knowledge (M = 4.75; SD = 1.15). Also, in 
terms of doing projects during the course (8), 
the students confirmed that doing projects 
together during the course helped them learn a 
lot of vocabulary as well as the translation 
skills (M = 4.72; SD= .97). Furthermore, (9) 
the students stated that apart from translating 
the exercises in the textbook, translating from 
4 to 5 economic reports helped them enhance 
their necessary vocabulary in doing 
translation (M = 4.54; SD = 1.04). The study 
indicates that the collaboration in doing 
projects is of great activities to help students 
learn from one another. As the 
instructor/researcher of this class, I found that 
each sentence, when translated by a group of 
92 Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University – No. 3(15) 2015 – August/2015 
students was much better than that if 
translated by individual. The instructors of 
translation classrooms should make use the 
power of group-work to enhance students’ 
skills and knowledge of translation. 
Research question 3: Do the activities 
of translating and dubbing voices into the 
Video clips motivate students in the learning 
processes? 
Questionnaire items 10 – 15 were 
analyzed to respond to this research question. 
Among four or five Economic reports that the 
students were assigned to do the translation 
for the classroom activities, they would 
purposively pick up one for dubbing their 
voices into the clips. The students were 
advised to select the one that they felt most 
confident in their translation to do it. This is 
from English to Vietnamese translation. 
Besides, each group was also assigned to 
select one of the 4-to-5 minute clips from the 
Vietnamese television program (provided 
online) in order to translate it into English and 
dub voices. The best person of the group 
might dub his/her voice to the Video clips for 
this activity. Table 3 reports the students’ 
attitudes towards the activities of dubbing 
students’ voices of their translated version 
into the video clips. 
Table 3. Activities of translating and dubbing voices into the video clips 
No. Dubbing voices into the clips N 
Mean 
Std. 
Deviation 
10 
I really enjoy translating the texts of Economic reports from 
the VOA Special English. 
125 4.28 1.04 
11 
I found that the activities of dubbing voices of the translated 
version in English into the video clips were motivating. 
125 3.95 1.34 
12 
I found that the activities of dubbing voices of the translated 
version in Vietnamese into the video clips were motivating. 
125 4.00 1.30 
13 
The activities of dubbing voices into the video clips make 
me concentrate more to enhance the quality of the 
translation versions. 
125 4.34 1.16 
14 
Thanks to the activities of translations of the Economic 
Report from VOA, I learned a lot of new vocabulary in 
economic field. 
125 4.59 1.11 
15 
The activities of translating the Economic Report from 
VOA helped me improve my knowledge in science. 
125 4.58 1.13 
 Valid N (listwise) 125 
Table 3 shows that, in general, the 
students were not highly motivated in the 
activities of translating the texts of Economic 
reports from the VOA Special English (M = 
4.28; SD = 1.04) (item 10) or those of 
dubbing voices into the video clips either in 
English version (M = 3.95; SD = 1.34) (item 
11) or in Vietnamese version (M = 4.00; CD = 
1.30) (item 12). This might come from the 
fact that just one or two representative 
members of each group dubbed his/her voice 
into it, so other might not find really 
 Instructional Model In Teaching Translation And Interpretation: A Case Study 93 
motivated in these activities. However, (13) 
most of the students assert that the activities 
of dubbing voices into the video clips make 
them focus more on enhancing the quality of 
the translation versions (M = 4.34; SD = 
1.16). Particularly, the students confirmed that 
(14) thanks to the activities of translation the 
Economic Reports, they learned a lot of new 
vocabulary in the economic field (M = 4.59; 
SD = 1.11) and (14) improve their knowledge 
in science (M = 4. 58; SD = 1.13). This was a 
remarkable finding of the instructional models 
of this paper in terms of pedagogical aspects 
when the students paid attention to the quality 
of their products and enhanced their 
vocabulary as well as knowledge in science. 
Though the hypothesis of this research 
question was rejected, the general purpose of 
education in promoting students to enhance 
quality of their learning products and 
knowledge was achieved when the students 
confirmed that they learned much vocabulary 
and improved their knowledge in science 
when participated in these activities. 
5. Conclusion 
The students in this study, after 
receiving a new instructional model, 
employed good strategies to obtain deep 
understanding of the source language in order 
to translate into the target language with the 
structure of the target language rather than 
that of the source language. This might come 
from the efforts of the lecturer who 
consistently reminded them of the essential 
strategies during the translation activities in 
the classroom. Different from what I 
described in the introduction when I observed 
the students’ translation activities, after 
training students with a new model, word-for-
word translation is no longer favoured by the 
HCMC OU students. In addition, 
collaborative translation activities were 
reported as a powerful means to help students 
learn from one another, improve knowledge 
and translation skills in order to enhance the 
quality of the translated versions. Although 
dubbing voices into Video clips was not found 
to be highly motivating the students in the 
learning processes, it functioned as a means to 
help students focus more on the quality of 
their products and learn new knowledge. 
Some limitations of this research are as 
follows. First, the current research is just a 
case study and functions as a preliminary 
study to test the instructional model employed 
at the Faculty of Foreign Language at HCMC 
OU, there is no means for generalization for 
any other contexts. Second, the quality of the 
translated version of the students were not 
measured by inter-raters. The researcher just 
tests the instructional model. Further research 
should focus on the following aspects: (1) the 
quality of students’ translated version, (2) 
strategies for translation activities. Also, 
collaborative translation should be researched 
with pre- vs. post-tests design. 
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