Translation as a communicative unit in language

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.

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

No one denies the fact that translation exists since the dawn of history, but as a practice and profession, it is only recently that work on its importance has begun to emerge and accelerate: the number of schools of translators and interpreters grows around the world; the work done on translation by practitioners, linguists and didacticians who gave birth to translation studies, and on machine translation; all this is a recognition of its historical value and its pragmatic importance.To move straightforwardly to the heart of our topic, we’ll introduce, even though briefly, the place of translation in language didactics, mainly for educational purposes.

Educational translation

Educational translation

“Educational translation” or the academic use of translation to acquire a foreign language as Delisle defines it in 1984, is a set of exercises (theme et version), which interest of the theme is clear, even in a purely communicative approach to language learning. It is a question of training oneself to a correct writing in a language other than one’s own. However, this is not the only interest of the exercise: the theme forces the translator to assimilate, in detail, the syntax of the target language, in order to be able to write complex sentences that are grammatically correct. The second interest is to vary the style and to stay close to that of the original text, of course, whenever possible.