Bachelor’s Degree L-12 Linguistic Mediation

With more than 40 years of experience, the SSML of Perugia has developed a degree programme that guarantees professional skills based on solid theoretical knowledge that allows our students to successfully face the world of work or to continue their studies at post-graduate level.

This degree is structured to train students to develop excellent linguistic and intercultural communication skills in Italian and at least two foreign languages, and solid skills in the field of translation and interpreting that reflect the changes, including technological changes, that have affected the fields of translation and interpreting.

We enable students to gain a solid education that meets the needs of the translation and interpreting market by offering classes with an average of 20-25 students, several hours of classroom teaching with mother-tongue teachers, state-of-the-art labs and software, close collaboration with local companies and constant development aimed at quality assurance and improvement.

The students enrolled in our courses are not just anonymous enrolment numbers. Our teachers and the administrative staff pay close attention to the students, promoting their academic as well as their personal growth.

We pride ourselves on our integrated approach-during the academic year, we constantly organize meetings with the participation of teachers from the different subject areas, which aim to monitor both the strengths and weaknesses of the whole BA degree. The main courses (language, translation and interpreting) are designed in order to guarantee a smooth, homogeneous and complete educational
pathway. Our integrated approach extends from the course contents to the exams, which have a similar structure across the different language options.

For each course all students are required to attend at least 70% of the lessons. It has been proven that, especially on a practical degree programme like ours, attendance gives students a higher probability of graduating successfully and on schedule. The course includes modules in dialogue interpreting and an introduction to conference interpreting. This subject enables students to develop advanced linguistic, communicative and analytical skills, which they will find useful regardless of whether they choose to become interpreters or not. We offer direct and inverse translation and interpreting courses meaning that all courses include specific modules both from the foreign language into Italian, and from Italian into the foreign language. Our academic staff are therefore native speakers of the language they teach.

Our university believes that new technologies are very useful in supporting teaching. We have been using an e-learning platform (Moodle) for several years to provide blended learning. Our staff makes full use of the platform’s potential to develop both individual and group assignments that can be completed online. These technologies are also used in support of face-to-face teaching. We believe that this kind of course is not suitable for distance learning, which is why we invest significant resources in face-to-face teaching: of the 25 hours for each CFU (University credit), at least 10 hours are dedicated to classroom teaching.

Our programme is designed to promote interdisciplinary learning and the development of
transferable skills through:

• small group projects
• targeted exercises to analyse and reflect on one’s own learning process
• problem-solving practice exercises applied to specific translation or interpreting projects.

Students are supported through attentive tutoring. This is fundamental both for first-year students, who may experience difficulties due to a lack of solid academic foundations or struggling to adapt to their new studies and environment, and for students further along in their studies.

Finally, throughout all the activities that characterise life at our university, academic and administrative staff pay special attention to the importance of strengthening the individual features of each student so that they will become more and more independent, aware and confident when entering the labour market.