SHOULD TRANSLATION TEACHING BE INCORPORATED INTO ‘REGULAR’ ENGLISH CLASSROOMS?

Abstract

A survey conducted on four different groups of professionally active subjects from the Subcarpathian region, Poland, revealed that employees who work in multilingual settings are regularly entrusted with typical translation and/or interpreting tasks that arise in such settings. Simultaneously, as also evidenced from the answers they provided, none of the courses of English they attended have prepared them for acting in the role of, as they referred to themselves, ‘substitute translators’. The major stress in these classrooms the eighty participants were part of was typically placed on preparing a learner for situations in which one needs to express oneself in L2 and not for situations in which one is required to translate or interpret. This has resulted in some of the participants’ suggestion for a special form of language pedagogy that would take into account that translation outside the classroom seems to have become the norm in contemporary global economy. The study, which ends with a brief presentation of the subjects’ ideas, may be of interest to educationalists in the field of Translation Studies whose expertise may be exploited for the purpose of helping experts in ELT design suitable teaching materials. Keywords: teaching translation, English for Occupational Purposes, learners’ needs, TEFL, syllabus design