The Language Industry has been continuously growing for the last 10 years, currently being one of the more robust economic sectors with an 11% estimated growth for 2020. Great
technological and skills developments have taken place along this growth in the private sector that have outpaced the translation training proposals at Higher Education institutions
despite considerable efforts to the contrary by scholars. The Translation Studies community, in the meantime, has adopted a research-based pedagogic agenda to inform translators’
training and education with the latest advances in empirical investigations on the translation process. In this context, we find disperse training needs and solutions that evidence a clear
gap between industry and academia. While this by now proverbial gap has been one of the warhorses in university translation schools, it is to this day that the academic community
has excelled in identifying the main issues with limited success in providing solutions. The irruption of the COVID-19 pandemic has urged the need to bridge this gap in an stricty digital environment.
OBJECTIVES
The main objective of this project, therefore, was to develop an innovative training model offering taking the most of technological advances to provide a new, industry-oriented and
research-based qualification. This objective was achieved by successfully attaining secondary objectives, including identifying industry needs and expectations, designing an open,
flexible online course in response to the gaps and requisites identified and creating learning resources enabling autonomous use. These actions also led to a second major objective, creating synergies and knowledge/transfer links between the university and the private sector by introducing modular, flexible and autonomous learning strategies.