Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018

Recent interest in the role of translation in language teaching calls for dialogue between the disciplines of Translation Studies and Language Education. In framing this dialogue, translation scholars would do well to avoid assuming superiority or special knowledge; they would instead do well to reflect on the history of their own discipline, particularly the opposition to language departments that can be found in some countries in the 1980s and 1990s. In politically turning away from language learning, translation scholars left the education field open for unopposed implantation of immersion and communicative teaching methods that ideologically shunned translation. Further, in framing their major internal debates in terms of binary categories, usually involving a good translation method opposed to a bad one, translation scholars themselves all but abandoned the non-binary pedagogical models that once included many types of translation solutions. Those non-binary models should now be investigated anew in order to rebrand translation for the language-education community. In so doing, however, translation scholars may need to break the unspoken pact that they have developed with the translation professions. They should instead adopt a view where everyone can translate, not just professionals, and everyone can be trained to translate better.

The purpose of this paper is to examine possible uses of translation in language teaching in the beginner-level language classroom. In particular, it analyses students’ performance in the translation of e-mails of refusal from Japanese to English before and after a series of five study sessions. The results show a significant change in students’ performance before and after the sessions. Before the study sessions, students largely focused on the transfer of the referential meanings of words and syntactic structure. In contrast, after the sessions, students took into consideration a range of the factors at stake in translation, including the relationship between the writer and reader, the nature of e-mails, and the writer’s intentions/feelings. Based on these results, this paper argues that (1) translation activities enable beginner students to act as cultural mediators between the writer of the source text and the reader of the target text, by mitigating potentially offensive acts to the reader; and (2) they encourage students to be more conscious of their choice of words and of the consequences of those choices.

The aim of this study was to determine to what extent translation may be an effective pedagogical tool for use by UK GCSE language students. It is offered as a contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the use of pedagogical translation. In March 2015, 41 students preparing for their GCSE Spanish exams were presented with a variety of translation-based activities, including a discussion about professional translation, a mistranslations exercise and a group translation task. The research design combined both translation as a means (explicative and process-oriented) and translation as an end (communicative and product-oriented), and was based upon a realistic, student-centred, socio-constructivist pedagogical foundation. Qualitative data, and a small amount of quantitative data, were collected via a post-session questionnaire and semi-structured group interview, through which students were asked about their experience of the translation sessions in order to answer the following questions: (1) According to students, does translation have a place in UK secondary school foreign language education? (2) If it does, what do students feel are its main benefits? (3) What form should translation activities take, according to students?

Students felt that translation could add to their language classes in a variety of ways, including building their confidence, making their language learning more engaging, giving their learning a more ‘real-world’, practical focus and increasing their general language competency. They also felt that it was best delivered in the form of task-based group work. Students’ responses to the translation sessions were overwhelmingly positive, providing compelling support for further use of both explicative and communicative translation tasks in UK secondary school language education.

This paper proposes a model that addresses students’ common errors in English-Arabic-English translation. My study documents an attempt to develop a new interconnectedness between students’ errors and translation theories that may improve their performance when translating different genres. Consistent and repeated errors produced by tens of students working on the same texts were compiled and analyzed. The errors showed lack of knowledge of genre structure, functional analysis, appropriate intervention as well as lack of understanding of the wider context upon which appropriate decisions can be made. The methodology expounded in this study involves describing and categorizing students’ errors. It suggests solutions grounded in translation theory and proposes comparisons with professional translations. This methodology proved to be very successful during my teaching experience at the Lebanese University. 1 The model solution developed in this study draws on genre analysis, text-typology, text-functionality, register analysis, and equivalence. The application of the model solution minimized students’ errors to a large extent and enabled them to provide accurate descriptions of different translation strategies and critically assess professional translations.

When Danish university students write essays, project reports or theses in their L1, based on a reading of sources in English as an L2, a covert interlingual translation process takes place when summarizing, paraphrasing or synthesizing the sources. Unfortunately, due to poor L2 reading skills as well as general translation competences, the English source texts risk being mistranslated in such a way that they are misrepresented. Thus, I suggest that we address the need for translation literacy, this being viewed as an academic skill, a language awareness learning process and a discourse practice in the international university context, which is increasingly relying on research published in English.

Based on an empirical analysis of student academic writing, I argue that translation literacy is needed when teaching academic reading-for-writing in higher education in general. Mastering translation competences may facilitate more in-depth understanding of the foreign language sources used as well as raise students’ intercultural awareness in a multilingual world at large.