French for Professionals: Translation and Interpretation as Panacea

Over the years, efforts have been made by the Nigerian governments to train professional translators and interpreters in the country; yet studies continue to point out deficiencies in the translations of words from English language to French language among the trained professionals. In this wise, this study, therefore, appraises the effectiveness of the French curriculum of the Nigerian French language Village and Ekiti State University (EKSU) from the students’ points of view. This is to determine the correlation between students’ linguistic needs and what they are being offered. Three research questions guided the study. Descriptive research design was adopted for the study. Through a simple random sampling technique, 50 postgraduates were selected from the examined schools respectively. A self-structured questionnaire entitled: Efficiency of French Curriculum for University Students’ Questionnaire (EFCUSQ) and ten unedited manuscripts translated by ten postgraduate students were used for the study.  Among other findings, the study revealed that students have positive attitudes towards the French translation curriculum, but lack the key words that best suits each word. Similarly, the study indicated that students have limited cultural knowledge of the French language, due to many domains being introduced and taught in the curriculum, which are not useful to their professions. Thus, the study recommends that a Need Assessment (NA) should be conducted at the beginning of each session to know the linguistic needs of each student. Keywords: FSP, Professionals, Translators, Interpreters, Needs Analysis, Nigeria