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ABSTRACT
The gradual reintroduction of translation into the foreign language classroom in the last few decades has generated considerable interest among teachers and scholars. A renewed focus on translation as an aspect of language teaching has simultaneously originated from and resulted in the publication of theoretical and empirical studies as well as monographs that recognise ‘pedagogical translation’ as a beneficial and increasingly accepted practice. However, conceptual and terminological inconsistencies persist that blur the boundaries between the general idea of using translation in the language classroom and more specific practices that involve translation tasks (also known as ‘pedagogical translation’) or code-switching. The article addresses these terminological incongruities by exploring the impact of conceptualisations of translation in language education and, specifically, its use in pedagogical translation. The goal is to consider the plethora of concepts related to translation in language teaching (TILT) and to explore how they may be connected with the reconceptualisation of translation in language pedagogy. This will open up useful avenues for a more thorough incorporation of translation into foreign language education, particularly at the secondary and college level, and will propose future lines of research and pedagogical sound praxis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 In this article ‘foreign language’ is the general term chosen to discuss issues related to teaching and learning a non-mother language in the classroom. ‘Second language’ is retained when used by a specific author or in an empirical study.
2 The term bilingual learner is widely used in England as a broad category to refer to pupils who are at various stages of learning English as a second or additional language for studying purposes and who have at least some knowledge and who have some knowledge and skills in another language or languages already (see Leung, Harris and Rampton Citation2011: 44).
3 Even though there are specific translation oral tasks that may be classified under PT.
4 A phenomenon that should not be perceived as isolated, as it can be related, for instance, with other phenomena in translation studies through concepts such as bi-texts, a term coined by Harris (Citation1988), and which refers to ‘the mental status in the cognitive processes in the translators’ (DGT Citation2013: 7).
5 Equivalent also to ‘educational translation’ and ‘didactic translation’ (Laviosa, personal correspondence, 2018)
6 Even though this data seems highly biased
in favour of the use of translation, and we have thus generally not used it in any quantitative way. The suspicion of bias comes from the way in which some well-known experts in language acquisition either dismissed the question of translation out of hand, or indicated their uneasiness or lack of qualifications to answer the questions. (Citation2013: 32)
7 Debates on how these terms (code-switching, code-changing, code-mesging, languaging, translanguaging) relate can be seen in García (Citation2009), who claims that translanguaging ‘goes beyond what has been termed code-switching […] although it includes it, as well as other kinds of bilingual use and bilingual contact’ (45).