A Research on Lesson Planning for Japanese-Korean Translation Courses: Focused on Seminar-Type Classes at Undergraduate Level

This paper presents a research on ‘lesson plans’ designed for Japanese-Korean translation courses at the undergraduate level. Amid emerging needs for such courses to be distinguished from those at the graduate level, ‘improving language proficiency and translation ability to the extent that students will be able to translate general texts’ is specified as the goals of undergraduate translation programs in this study.
A lesson plan is designed for teaching by class hour, containing two key elements; ‘lesson notes’ and ‘questioning’. Lesson notes sum up the ‘translation issues’ identified through the objective analyses of texts translated from Japanese to Korean. Translation issues serve as topics for discussion in-class. Questioning techniques are used for active group-discussion to help students find answers on their own. The lesson plan proposed in this study is different from others that are not based on translated texts in that the questions are generated from the lesson notes and seminar-type translation classes are planned.
With the help of a lesson plan, teachers can identify the problems facing the students. They can use it as a tool to properly intervene in seminar-type translation classes and thereby inspire students to engage in discussions and aim for higher academic achievement.
By the way, this research is not intended to propose a seminar-type translation class model. Its scope is limited to the preparation of lesson plans for seminar-type translation classes based on the result of data analysis, the investigation of their applicability, and the suggestion of their usage. Since it is not about measuring and verifying the effect of lesson plans on seminar-type translation classes, it does not analyze the behavior of learners who sit in undergraduate translation programs.
Lesson plans work as a checklist for group-discussions to proceed in the right direction when seminar-type translation classes take place in the learner-centered environment. They are not directly tied to a better achievement of learning goals, but can realize them in the end by helping teachers design seminar-type translation classes and learners participate in discussions.
There is no single way of teaching translation. Of many different ways, however, this research is expected to provide lesson plans as a tool that aids teachers to play proper roles in seminar-type translation classes, thereby stimulating students’ participation in discussions and contributing to raising their academic achievement.