Article,
Translation as a learning and teaching strategy
Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction/International Journal of Translation, (2004)
Abstract
This paper deals primarily with the potentiality a translation task could bring to the learning/teaching environment. Since translation deals with language in its socio-cultural communicative context, it could serve as an indispensable teaching/learning tool, a medium for developing the learners communicative competence and for teaching properties and types of meaning, underlying semantic relationships, communicative language functions, sentential and suprasentential information structure and discourse values. In this paper, it is argued that translation is a. an interlingual, interactive, communicative and cognitive activity b. a macro-skill that subsumes a number of micro-skills c. a meaningful task-based exercise, a problem-solving exercise that helps develop the learners data processing capabilities d. a meaningful communicative context for presenting and practising language forms and lexical items e. a means for highlighting interlingual structural differences, and f. a medium for teaching thematic meaning.
