Editing of summary translation: key aspects for teaching

Summary translation traditionally takes an important place in university ESL courses, as it not only addresses a range of key educational objectives, but also prepares students for efficient professional communication. At the same time, it is one of the most complex and challenging types of interlingual mediation of significant difficulty for students. Existing relevant textbooks and teaching materials focus primarily on the analysis, condensation, and summarization of the source text, while considerably less attention is given to the creation of the secondary text and its editing. The aim of this work is to present the main aspects of teaching of summary translation editing. To achieve this, the specific features of summary translation, the stages of its execution, the main drawbacks of summary texts, and the aspects and approaches to editing aimed at addressing these drawbacks are examined sequentially. The main research methods include the analysis of methodological and teaching guidelines and studies devoted to summary translation, as well as the analysis of experience in organizing a summary translation competition, i.e. the development of methodological support and the assessment of students’ competition entries. It has been demonstrated that editing summary translations constitutes an important yet methodologically challenging stage due to its cross-discursive nature and complexity. Teaching summary editing should take into account the following aspects: content-related, functional, subject-specific, linguistic, and formal. These are aimed at coping with the drawbacks stemming from insufficient understanding of the source text’s characteristics, the summary genre, and disregard for formal requirements. A checklist emerges as the optimal tool for organizing the educational process: it ensures a comprehensive review of all aspects, effectively structures the workflow, and is easily understood by today’s students.