A project-based approach to teaching medical translation to deaf students: integrating the BabelDr corpus in a continuing education programme at the Faculty of translation and interpreting, University of Geneva

This paper focuses on a specific case study in which a project-based approach was implemented to teach medical translation to deaf students enrolled in a continuing education programme that started in 2022 at the Faculty of translation and interpreting, University of Geneva. The deaf participants had to translate a real corpus of 1179 medical sentences (yes/no questions and short affirmative sentences) that were developed by doctors for the emergency unit of the Geneva University Hospital. The broader aim of this project, called BabelDr, is to enable doctors to perform a preliminary medical examination of patients with whom they have no shared language. Translations in the form of videos in Swiss French Sign Language (LSF-CH) are shown to deaf patients, who are initially expected to respond non-verbally. Students worked on this translation project during two classes under the supervision of two deaf trainers. Using an ethnographic method, classroom interactions were recorded, observed, and analysed to identify the tasks and the competencies developed. Our findings suggest this approach enhances both medical translation-specific and general transferable competencies, informing potential content for specialised medical translator training.