I know languages, therefore, I can translate?

Abstract

There is a large presence of translators without formal education in the Slovene market, partly because until the 1990s there were no independent translation programs, but also because of the popular notion that anybody who speaks a foreign language well, or has a degree in it, can translate. In this paper we present a comparison of four B.A. programs at the University of Ljubljana (in three foreign language departments and one department of translation) to shed light on what knowledge and competences are expected at the end of the B.A. studies, and to find out whether these departments actually train people to be translators. The paper also reports the results of a translation quality assessment of third-year students of those departments, who were given the task of translating a text into their L1. The students approached the task in different ways and produced very different results, which indicates that language competences alone are not enough for translation, and that specific additional instruction can give them a considerable advantage at the beginning of their careers.