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Specialized communication skills, in combination with a multilingual professional competence, are crucial to address the demands of our today's complex reality. Over the last decades, institutions of higher education have more and more incorporated project-based learning (PBL) into their curricula, in a response to prepare students to new professional challenges and a wide range of employment opportunities. This paper presents a Project-based learning (PBL) approach by introducing Master's students of "Languages and Business Relations " at the University of Aveiro to two Translation Management Systems (TMS), i.e. memoQ and Memsource. Both TMSs allow students to explore a wide range of practical learning experiences, as they enable the creation of multilingual databases through term extraction, sentence alignment of bilingual corpora, the preparation of a project quote, among many other functionalities.
Keywords: project-based learning, higher education, Translation Management System (TMS), memoQ, Memsource
INTRODUCTION
This paper proposes a PBL approach by working with two Translation Management Systems, that is, Memsource and memoQ. Both TMSs provide an ideal platform for the adoption of innovative learning methodologies and are, therefore, incorporated into the subject "Applied Project German", which is part of the first year Master's course "Languages and Business Relations" at the University of Aveiro. We propose to explore how through PBL students can be familiarized with a multidisciplinary learning approach, enhancing their professional skills by offering them a set of practical and diversified exercises.
PROJECT-BASED LEARNING
There has been extensive research on the implementation of PBL in higher education and, although PBL is not new, it has been receiving more emphasis over the last years. This change is due to the fast transformation of today's labour market and a response to the effects of the "fourth industrial revolution", which "is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres" (Schwab, 2016). Such a whole-level transformation urges higher education institutions and industry to foster new perspectives and approaches towards collaboration and synergy. In recent years, due to the technological advancement, PBL has become a major methodology with an increasing presence in higher education curricula. As stated by Uden & Beaumont (2006, p. 26): "University education should, ideally, provide students with the necessary skills, values, and attitudes that are essential to...