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The European Graduate Placement Scheme (EGPS) project is funded by the Erasmus strand of the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme. The project began on 1 October 2012 and will end in March 2015. Its overall goals are to establish a European framework for work placements for postgraduate students in translation companies and to facilitate educational synergies between universities and companies in a number of European member states. A major component of the project is the development of a curriculum model for the incorporation of work placements into translation studies degree programmes. This curriculum component is the focus of attention in this article.

More specifically, the project aims to:

•       enhance European cooperation between enterprises and higher education institutions (HEIs)

•       stimulate and facilitate the international mobility of university students of translation

•       increase the employability of translation students following completion of their degrees

•       build on existing collaborative ventures between employers, HEIs and related translator-education projects and

•       contribute to curriculum development that incorporates workplace experience within programmes of study

The scheme is expected to lead to more partnerships between institutions of higher education and employers, providing masters students with experience in a commercial translation environment and real-life professional situations in another EU member state and thereby increasing their prospects for mobility once they join the workforce. Partners from different European countries will be sharing good practice in the area of work placements with a view toward creating a viable model for European work placements in the translation domain.

It is expected that the project will benefit students by providing them with access to a much wider range of placement opportunities across Europe, and by making them eligible for Erasmus funding. HEIs will be able to offer their students a wider range of placement opportunities across Europe. Employers can benefit from the scheme by accessing masters-level translation students with a range of specialisations and language pairs.

A key component of the project is the development of a curriculum development model and plan for incorporating work placements into translation studies curricula. On the basis of prior work carried out at the School of Translation, Linguistics and Cultural Studies of the University of Mainz, Germany, one of the EGPS partner universities, a novel curriculum model is being created and tested within the scope of the project. It is designed as an evolutionary step beyond the still prevalent reductionist view of curriculum design towards an emergentist vision that is in tune with state-of-the-art thinking on the nature of learning in our post-modern era. The essence of the proposed innovation might be seen as an evolutionary transition from a fractured competence perspective to a fractal (self-similar, self-generating and emergent) one.

The project partners are:

• Skills CfA, the UK standard-setting body for languages, translation, interpreting and intercultural skills
• University of Salford, UK
• Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland
• Universidad Autonòma de Barcelona, Spain

·         Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany

This paper provides 1) a brief overview of the present status of the EGPS project, and 2) insights into the curriculum development model created as the pedagogical cornerstone of the scheme.