The authentic translation project has been widely recognised in translation education as a key approach in facilitating the construction of students’ pre-professional identities. Although there is a consensus that this method poses significant learning challenges, adequate attempts to explore various sources, associated feelings and responses, and subsequent transformation, seem to be lacking. To address this gap, this study is built on an exploratory classroom research design in which I have worked with a group of Saudi university students on a published translation work. The students’ learning experiences have been collected from their own stories which they shared through a set of journals and interviews. Drawing from the field of educational psychology, the analysis of their narratives has been inspired and guided by the threshold concepts framework and its concept of liminality (Meyer and Land, 2003).
The students’ stories pose the translation project experience as a form of liminal process. It is initiated by encountering three areas unknown to the students: (i) a loosely structured module, (ii) the translation project, and (iii) the role of a professional translator. This encounter was found to be complex and multifaceted, triggering feelings of strangeness and doubt, posing several troublesome practices, and occasional entry into various stuck places. Adopting a mythological view of liminality, this research looks at the student’s progression through the project cycle as a heroic journey. This lens has allowed recognising the social and dynamic nature of being in a liminal learning experience, the role of the learner’s decisions in their own transition as well the influence of others. Opportunities appear to maintain a transformative potential, just as struggles do and translation troublesomeness has been found to go beyond linguistic knowledge to include organisational practices, peers and professionals, students’ own practices and misconceptions, and understanding the epistemic game.
Students’ responses to challenges were found to be varied, situated, and affective giving rise to various transitional patterns. This variation is explained by self-concept and management strategies as well as other aspects related to the awareness and psychological traits of the individual, as well as those of others. Although the relation between these factors and the transformative status achieved has been found to be complicated, it suffices to show the process of becoming as pre-professionals as stretching across a wide spectrum of outcomes. This continuum view allows one to see that a basic change in understanding what translation is represents a pre-requisite for any ontological shift, but there is a possibility that some students might get stuck and be unable to move towards the embodiment state.
To migrate these findings to classroom practice, this study has used the students’ storied experiences to propose a pre-professional translator hero’s journey that depicts its complexity as well as possible resources and transitional moments. Using this model as a pedagogical tool, along with heroic archetypes to introduce an authentic translation project to learners is believed to enhance their mindfulness of the project as a liminal process as well as their own ways of thinking of translation and becoming as pre-professionals. Awareness is identified as being the basis for creative engagement with liminal states; thus, students are expected to positively negotiate with the pre-translation phase, tolerate the growth of self-doubt afterwards, and develop the courage to undertake changes towards the embodiment of who they want to become.
