Stances toward translation training and the discipline. A study of future translators’ EFL retrospective reports

Increased attention to professionalism and realism in translation classes at university has resulted in the development of a wide range of approaches to foster future translators’ construction of knowledge and identity pertaining to their upcoming professional career and community. This paper centres on a professionalizing seminar that shared these aims. Employing corpus, stance and discourse analysis, it examines the retrospective reports written by the future translators who participated in the seminar to unveil beliefs on their experience of the seminar, their university training, their perceived competence, and their present and future identities as translators. The results of the study suggest, on the one hand, that participants perceived that the seminar fostered awareness of the professional domain of translators, heightened cognizance of their skills, and gave them authentic practice as translators and, on the other, participants perceived lacunae in their training and gaps in their competences, with potential implications on their (perceived) employability.