The purpose of the course is to enable students to take care of a company’s specialised communication by translating text between Danish and German within technical, economic and legal areas, which often occurs in international companies and organisations. The students are introduced to specialised language and specialised text genres which frequently occur in business-related contexts, as well as translation methods, terminology work, information searches and documentation focusing on the above-mentioned genres. Students work with the translation of specialised texts with a focus on the individual phases of the translation process and on critical analysis and discussion of translation-related issues.
The students find it difficult to structure and create an overview of the texts on the subject. I therefore wanted to introduce an activity that could help the students become aware of methods to structure the literature of the course. The primary objective of the activity was to teach the students how to acquire the key academic competences of the course and to promote dialogues for understanding. The activity was meant to enable the students to create connections between the literature of the subject and its key concepts and to teach them to illustrate these connections using so-called knowledge maps. A knowledge map is a type of mind map which illustrates the logical relationships between key concepts, and which states the information source. Knowledge maps enable the students to retrieve the information at a later time, i.e. when having to account for the content of a concrete text or solve a task or in an exam situation. In other words, the activity was to provide the students with a tool that support their cognitive work of translating the information of the course into individual knowledge.
As an introduction to their work with knowledge maps and problem-based learning (PBL), these concepts, knowledge management, and concrete tools (e.g. mind mapping) are presented to the students. Many free tools for this purpose are available on the Internet.
The students are instructed to prepare knowledge maps in connection with individual reading of selected literature, and to present their knowledge maps in class or in smaller groups, explaining their choice of structuring method. The purpose is to promote a dialogue of understanding among the students.
In this course, we have also worked with knowledge maps in relation to concrete text production tasks in which the students are instructed to collect and organise knowledge about an academic subject that is new to them in order to enable them to compose and/or translate a text about the topic in question. For this purpose, the students were instructed to work in groups to find relevant texts/sources about this topic, either as preparation for class or during a teaching session. On the basis of the text production assignment an the purpose of the text they have to compose, the students are asked to produce a suitable knowledge map, which they can use either as a structuring tool when choosing a connecting thread for their own text product (text composition) or as a terminological tool when having to translate a text. The aim is to support the students’ systematic work with a subject area they are not familiar with.
In my opinion, the students became more aware of the importance of creating a system in their own acquisition of knowledge and of documenting this. At the same time, they experienced a sense of having obtained a tool they could use continuously to expand their knowledge of the key academic competences of the course, because the knowledge map is dynamic and can constantly be expanded and adapted.
Next time I have to teach this course, I will prepare my own knowledge map at the beginning of the course to illustrate to the students how I work with the technique. This is based on my experience that the presentations and discussions of the students’ knowledge maps were difficult because some students had not understood the idea of creating the knowledge maps.
