The Role of Translation in Language Learning and Teaching

Abstract

It is a widespread assumption that the objective of second language teaching is to focus the learners’ attention exclusively on the particular features of the second language so as to get them to approximate to native speaker competence as closely as possible. In this way of thinking, translation, or any reference to the learners’ first language, is to be avoided as at best a distraction from, at worst a disruption of the learning process. Translation can however be understood as general interpretative activity that is always involved in the realisation of pragmatic meaning within as well as across languages. An alternative way of conceiving of language pedagogy would be to naturalise learning by encouraging rather than inhibiting learners’ engagement in this pragmatic process by drawing on all the linguistic resources at their disposal and to give credit to what learners achieve in making meaning, no matter what non-conformist or linguistically hybrid form it takes. The objective then would be defined in terms not of some illusory and unattainable native speaker competence but of a capability for ‘languaging’, for using linguistic resources to pragmatic effect.