Abstract

It has been pointed out that current professional education in various domains at the tertiary level tends to be incapable of providing professional trainings in which their teaching/ learning contents do not meet requirements set by professional communities. This concern appears to be consistent with translator education due to its ongoing dominant use of ‘transmissionist’ approach (Kiraly, 2000). Discussion presented in this paper is based on the partial findings of the ongoing PhD research project. The research project as a whole makes an attempt to introduce a new pedagogical approach based on the concepts of expertise and problem-solving, and their application to translator education. To enable this approach to be realised in translator education, identifying translation challenges with which a translator is likely to face and discrepancies of such challenges between novice and expert translators are very necessary. In this paper, the focus of discussion is placed primarily on the exploration of ‘authentic’ translator challenges and the investigation of discrepancies in terms of the challenges between novice and expert translators.