SIMULTANEOUS DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AND COMPUTER SKILLS:AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO TRANSLATION

Abstract

Abstract. English courses for technical sciences cannot be cut off from reality if they are to have meaningful, well organized and up-to-date syllabi. Such courses need to follow the trends in modern technologies and be incorporated in the curriculum in a manner that they allow students to develop an interdisciplinary or even a multi-disciplinary approach to their learning strategies, by combining knowledge and skills from different areas of study. Therefore, what is learnt from professional technical courses should be applied in the ESP course as well, giving students the opportunity to express their professional knowledge in English classes and develop their professional English language skills that they, as future experts, need to possess for successful careers in their field of expertise. Also, by empowering students with the adequate language skills, the ESP course should provide a good basis to students for their future independent research and use of English in the domain of professionally-oriented language. This paper will show one such example, in which the students of Modern Computer and Communication Technologies from the College of Applied Technical Sciences in Nis were asked to use a new computer programme, that is a special language software for subtitles and text editing, for developing their translation skills in the domain of ESP. After a short tutorial in English on how to use this software and a list of instructions in English to follow, the students were requested to translate a five-minute long video taken from the popular cable TV show How it's made, found on the Youtube channel, to gain new computer and language skills in this process. The technique used for this ESP class finds its theoretical background in the Joint action theory in didactics devised by Herbert Clark and the teaching/learning process as a didactic collaborative game.