The Undergraduate Program in Applied Foreign Language (LEA) is one of the founding degrees of the Faculty of Human Sciences and the degree with the one of the highest employment rates for this area of studies (official data from the General Directorate of Statistics for Education and Science).
Groundbreaking in terms of the Higher Education offer of this area, the LEA degree has an international transdisciplinary bent in the three variants offered (Business Relations, Translation, and Portuguese as a Foreign Language).
It is both innovative and up to date in its understanding that a complex job market requires professionals with multidisciplinary and rigorous answers, based on a solid scientific and ethical training.
It is dynamic and challenging in its presentation of innovative methodologies that encourage students' active participation and that include Service-Learning models, inter-class collaboration and projects outside the university. The fact that the Faculty of Human Science obtained the European Language Label in 2022 is a statement of this constant innovation.
While combining knowledge from different Colleges, the degree's multidisciplinary curriculum is based on three fundamental pillars:
- Learning languages and their complex intercultural frameworks;
- Theoretical reflection on cultural, juridical and economic contexts within ever more globalised society;
- Functional knowledge that guides students through the diverse work contexts (geographically and culturally) in which they will develop a specialized professional practice.
Why choose Translation?
In an increasingly globalized world, the demands of intercultural communication go well beyond fluency in a lingua franca. Specific contexts of communication, negotiation and conviviality require a differentiated mastery of other languages and the recognition of the cultural capital of each, in addition to specific translation skills appropriate to each area.
In addition to a deepening of knowledge of the Portuguese language and the rigorous study of the English language, students will have the opportunity to specialize in a second foreign language, and to choose between Spanish, French and German and familiarise themselves with the cultural frameworks of these languages.
This specialization aims to train translators in different areas and for different markets, whether businesses, translation offices, publishers, or international bodies.
To meet the increasingly diverse, yet increasingly digitally-dependent demands of the job market on translators, the Translation specialization relies on a recent and innovative discipline – Computer-Assisted Translation
Translation encompasses different areas of expertise with which students come into contact during the degree, among which are, namely, literary translation, audio-visual translation, economic translation or legal translation.
