A Longitudinal Study on an EAP Course for MTI Students: Introduction to Engineering Knowledge and Its Translation

With the development of international exchanges and globalization, there is an increasing need for translators and interpreters. Language students of translation majors usually lack scientific or technical knowledge. This paper introduces an innovative EAP (English for Academic Purposes) course－Introduction to Engineering Knowledge and Its Translation to students of Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) at a top university in China. The course is innovative in terms of teaching objectives, content of learning, pedagogy and aims to introduce fundamental knowledge as well as core vocabulary in four major engineering fields (Electronic and Telecommunication Technology, Mechanical & Electrical Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Materials Science & Engineering) to enable students to read specialized articles, perform engineering English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation engineering. The paper mainly focuses on this EAP course’s design and the improvement of the teaching effectiveness, which has implications for other EAP course designs. Course development can be divided into two stages: 2017-2020; 2021-now. TPCK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) is adopted in stage 1 and 2; POA (Production-Oriented Approach) approach is adopted in stage 2 to improve the teaching effectiveness. Surveys are conducted to get students’ feedback for improvement and students’ evaluation to the course obtained from the school’s teaching website shows that students’ satisfaction to the course increases over the years. Analysis of the students’ translation indicates the usefulness of POA in enhancing students’ competence of engineering translation and the course assessment shows the accomplishment of the teaching objectives.