Case study of ESP and translation: course design and students’ experiences

Abstract

The article presents the course ESP and translation for the second and third- year students of Translation and Editing bachelor study programme at Mykolas Romeris University (Lithuania), which is discussed from different perspectives. The aim of the paper is twofold: 1) to test the course on ESP and Translation in the humanities (main parameters, their relevance, efficiency of the tasks) against the ESP scholars’ main assumptions about the ESP per se, and 2) to discuss students’ experience and reflections on the course after its delivery. The course goals and objectives, as well as the scope of the course are analysed to determine the correspondence of the course according to the ESP sub-areas presented by Williams (2014, 2-3). Reflecting scholarly insights into ESP exponential growth for academic purposes over the last 20 years and the idea that hybridity is a constitutive part of specialized genres, the paper focuses on the composition of the ESP course aiming at the acquisition of certain specialized language skills focused on the field of humanities and practical translation skills. The duality of the course composition and training of specialized skills reflects the complexity of the discussed course. Web 2.0 environment and tools constitute a part of the multimodal resources of this course as well as tools for translation training. Finally, the relevance of such course, desired results and students and teacher’s satisfaction are also addressed. The qualitative research perspective is applied for the collection and analysis of the data.