Developing a Community of Practice Through Collaborative Translation: Minority Languages in Translation Technology Teaching in Hong Kong

Translation supported by digital and technological tools has brought to the fore the collaborative nature of translation in recent years (Author A, Jiménez-Crespo 2017). Related issues that have been examined include translator motivations (Olohan 2014), the actual process of collaborative translation (Jones 2019), the ethics of digital collaborative translation (Zwischenberger 2022), and online translation communities (Author B). Although learning is a prominent motivating factor, the potential of incorporating digital collaborative translation into translator training has received scarce attention. This paper examines how digital collaborative translation engaged in by trainee translators and South Asian (SA) ethnic minority (EM) teenagers constitutes a learning process, and how the community repertoire brought in by the participants is negotiated in the production of trilingual (English, Cantonese, and Urdu/Hindi) videos in the community of practice (CoP) (Wenger 1998) forged through their shared practice.

We firstly introduce the research background – our project that examines multilingualism and multiculturalism in Hong Kong. We then move on to discuss an ethnographic action research methodology adopted. Following eighteen-month-long ethnographic fieldwork, we brought in SA EM teenagers to the translation technology course that the first author taught. Trainee translators and EM teenagers collaboratively planned and executed their audiovisual translation projects upon the request of their job commissioner – the project’s NGO partner. The data collected include ethnographic fieldnotes taken from the start of the project, course teaching and learning materials, the recordings of all four joint sessions engaged in by both EM students and trainee translators, the reflective journals written by trainee translators, and interviews with all three parties. Drawing on the CoP theory, the analysis sheds light on how repertoire and knowledge are negotiated in a CoP in the classroom setting, how collaborative translation is understood by the participants, and to what extent service-learning is beneficial to translation technology teaching.