Graduation Paper as a Tool of Assessing Professional Aptitude of a Translator

New market realities in the translation industry and elsewhere require an innovative approach to the content of higher education and a refocus on soft and hard skills. A prospective translator shall possess communicative skills, be capable of critical thinking, self-management, teamwork, engage in project activities, as well be creative, intellectually flexible, and digitally literate. New trends in the profession are conducive to revising educational strategies for graduation papers (GP) written by undergraduates. GPs are still theory-oriented, thus failing to meet the pragmatic needs of the translation industry, and lack correlation with hands-on professional activities. Bachelor GPs seem especially challenging, since neither Russian education authorities, nor academic instructors have a clear-cut vision of the bachelor's degree training and its specific nature. Most often, the bachelor's degree is deemed as a simplified version of the specialist's degree. The professional standard and the Federal State Educational Standard on Linguistics provide that graduates shall have general cultural, general professional, and professional competences (PCs). If mastered, these competences will qualify graduates for independent professional activities outside the academic institution. This paper presents feasibility study results for practice-oriented GPs. These results are analyzed to see if such GPs match relevant translation problems and if a new practice-oriented method can be used as a tool to assess graduates' professional aptitude for independent translation activities. The authors discourse upon effectiveness of this tool in education based on LUNN case study. The selection scope covers GPs written in 2015-2020, their number exceeding 200. Keywords: practice-oriented training, graduation paper, professional competences, annotated translation, translation project.