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, and 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. The goal is to enable students to read specialized articles and perform engineering English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation. The paper mainly focuses on this EAP course’s design and the improvement of teaching effectiveness, which has implications for other EAP course designs.

Course development can be divided into two stages: 2017-2020 and 2021-now. In both stages, TPCK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) is adopted. In stage 2, the POA (Production-Oriented Approach) is additionally adopted to improve teaching effectiveness. Surveys are conducted to gather students’ feedback for improvement, and students’ evaluations of the course are obtained from the school’s teaching website. The course assessment includes analysis of students’ translation outputs to measure the usefulness of POA in enhancing students’ competence in engineering translation. The longitudinal design allows for comparison of student satisfaction and learning outcomes over the years.