Translation as a communicative unit in language

If in his 1956 article Jakobson associates the introduction of theconcept of metalanguage with the name of Alfred Tarski, then in hisarticle On linguistic aspects of translation, published in 1959, he introduces a new aspect and points to thename of Niels Bohr, who brought out the complementarity of anobject-language and its metalanguages. From complementarity comesa more flexible approach to the translatable, since natural languagemanifests itself as a universal means of communication: “All cogni-tive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existinglanguage”translation. Complementarity alsoextends to the definition of types of translation. The concept of inter-pretation becomes generalized: “We distinguish three ways of inter-preting a verbal sign: it may be translated into other signs of the samelanguage, into another language, or into another nonverbal system ofsymbols”. As a result, it is possible tospeak of three types of translation: intralingual translation orrewording, interlingual translation or translation proper and inter-semiotic translation or transmutation.

This paper stresses the role of translation in teaching foreign languages. The student who practices translation improves his linguistic competence in two languages ​​and therefore develops his bilingualism. We will try to explain this statement by asking the following two questions: Why translate to learn a language? And how to translate to develop language skills? To answer the first question, it is necessary to resort to the most recent didactic, linguistic and psychological studies which all assert the importance of translation in the acquisition of a second language. As for the second question, it is necessary to draw on the pedagogy of translation in order to set the practice on sustainable foundations . In other words, we will try to show that the course of translation guides the learner to the conceptualization of linguistic systems, not through pure and simple correspondence, but through a comparative reflection emphasizing on the similarities and differences between the two languages put in ​​parallel.