Since the beginning of the previous decade, the European Union has been promoting the development of translation skills, among other characteristics of multilingualism, in order to promote “cultural diversity in the field of media and content online, as well as to start an intercultural dialogue within Europe as well as with the other regions of the world.” For the EU, “translation, on account of the links it establishes between languages and cultures, along with the broad access it provides to works and ideas, plays a special role in the process of this promotion.”
Nevertheless, language educators, a group of professionals whom you would expect to see on the forefront of such transition, have been “trained” to swiftly discard notions that translation might play any kind of beneficial role in regards to language learning. In the modern language classroom, the use of translation is frowned upon due to its resemblance to outdated language teaching methods of the past which focused exclusively on tiring grammar instruction and repetition blended with enforced translation that made no sense to the students.
The Cat that Sat on a Hat framework is a project-based training service created by ConnectiVision with the aim of helping educational institutions, as per the EU guidelines, to take the extra step towards the introduction and fostering of translation as a “goal-driven communicative activity and to encourage the creative use of it”. Through The CAT that SAT on a HAT framework, students will greatly benefit from seamless, project-based CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) technology training, and will take advantage of the possibility to turn translation into a quick, fun, collaborative activity, whose results will expand the amount of media available to students of foreign languages and to the public in general.
For more information about the framework, please
