Reacting to Translations Past: A game-based approach to teaching translation studies

Reacting to the Past is a pedagogical approach that incorporates historical role-playing games into the classroom. In this paper I discuss this approach and demonstrate how it could be adapted for translation studies courses. Two games are described: one is set in England in the early 1500s and focuses on William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible, while the other is set in Canada in 2007 and focuses on the development of the Canadian standard for translation services. Finally, to shed some light on the experiences and reactions of students who are taught using the Reacting to the Past approach, I briefly discuss the results of a survey of translation students who played the two games in an undergraduate theory of translation course during the Fall 2012 term.