A Case Study of Technology-Assisted Flipped Learning in Enhancing Learner Translation Capabilities and Its Mitigated Challenges

2.1. Translation Training and Translation Habits

Translation is a linguistic activity to render meaning from one source language into a target language (Newmark, 1988), and translation training is a discipline that caters to the preparation of trainees for the market. Adapted from the functional approach of Nord (2012), the key factor of translation requires that the core information in the source text being translated is adequately communicated in the form of the target language.

Translation habits could be defined as a set of all the regular, settled, or behavioral strategies that learners adopt to solve specific translation problems both consciously and unconsciously (Zhu, 2017). Moreover, as Do (2019) maintained, a solid foundation of good translation habits means that the translators are able to adopt professional strategies on a consistent basis in appropriate situations to do their assignments. This means individuals who can demonstrate exemplary good translation habits are highly valued and have a better employability. In short, good translation habits imply a high awareness of the appropriate use of professional strategies in particular situations and the high frequency of using these strategies to do the tasks (Zhu, 2017). Therefore, helping learners to develop good translation habits should be given more consideration within the translation training process. Regarding this issue, Martín de León (2016) suggested a five-step approach in teaching professional translation strategies and developing learners’ translation habits. Figure 1 demonstrates this adapted approach as follows.

Figure 1.

Five-step approach to navigate learners’ habits