Satellites of Knowledge Networking the voices of academia and the profession

This paper seeks to present the challenges and obstacles faced by academics from within universities as they attempt to reconcile humanities-based objectives with the pressing need expressed from the profession for translation students adequately prepared in technologies, including for localization projects. The global economy and globalization, in which information and knowledge and their transfer play a fundamental role, would seem to necessitate a more global approach to training and education and continuing professional career development. The exponential rise in the volume of translation worldwide, clearly resulting from the development and dissemination of computer, information and communication technologies, renders the successful introduction and implementation of technologies in translation and localization courses all the more urgent. How can this most effectively be done, particularly when the lines between training, education and business seem to be crossed more substantially and frequently than most academic institutions might initially feel comfortable with? Perhaps the answer lies within a new paradigm of collaboration. 1. Academic environments Academic environments are unique spaces. They thrive on the cultivation and implementation of ideas. They allow for the divulgation of information, circulation of knowledge and mentoring of skills by encouraging and facilitating productive exchanges within a wide community that intersects scholars, researchers, professors, part-time instructors, students, invited speakers, consultants, professional practitioners and many others. They afford participants in this community with an opportunity to step back from the fast-paced environment of the professional world and to contemplate product and the mechanisms of process in a different light, be it through relations of power, gender, race, class, economics, philosophy, cultural studies, and so on. In the best of scenarios, the research undertaken through the community can make a real difference in practice. The practice of translation has been carried out across the globe since the earliest of human times. Yet, translation and translator training and education within the infrastructure of the academy and academic community is a relatively recent phenomenon. The discipline in the humanities we currently know as "Translation Studies" has developed and evolved remarkably over the past 30 years. Significantly interdisciplinary in nature, it studies and teaches theoretical frameworks, conceptual models, practical