DANI Fatiha
Oran 1 University , Ahmed Benbella
ABSTRACT
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
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.
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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.
The traditional methods of language teaching adopted translation as a means of consolidating linguistic acquisition in a foreign language through the exercise of theme, and control of the comprehension of texts by means of the version. “The goal of educational translation is essentially didactic”. It is practiced within the framework of the language class (except in the particular case of examinations and competitions) and the receiver is either the student or the teacher, in both cases, a small and familiar audience. In this case, translation is no longer an end but a means, insofar as what matters is not the message or the meaning that the text conveys, but the act of translating and the different functions it fulfils: language, perfection, control of understanding, solidity of what is acquired, and the establishment of structures … (Laviosa, 2014, pp.81-82).
Used for pedagogical reasons (class motivation, evaluation of achievements, help of weaker pupils, etc.), translation into the language class takes many practices, including “explanatory translation”. This type of translation is used to explain the language. The teacher uses it when the intralingual translation cannot lead to positive results. From the lexicon point of view, when a word of the foreign language is new and rarely used, the teacher explains it in the mother tongue to save time and avoid confusion for the learner. From a grammatical point of view, the explanatory translation is useful insofar as it allows to identify the points of difference or similarity between the two linguistic systems (the foreign language and the mother tongue)
Translation, being in this case a means and not an end in itself, has an uncomfortable status: viewed as an activity without clear objectives, a thoughtless practice, taught by foreign language teachers who had received no prior training for this task, in fact. This dark side of translation required an epistemological break with the past in order to place the didactic discourse on translation and its practice, on a scientific basis.
Indeed, several authors, such as Ballard (1988, p.120), Grellet (1996,p.93), Laviosa (2014, p.45), …, defended the practice of translation in language classes, but with a new didactic vision, that of perfecting the competence to “translate” as well as the skills of “understanding, reading and writing”.
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Why translate to learn a foreign language?
Nowadays, pedagogical translation is a subject of debate between educators and “didacticians”. The discussion is not only about its usefulness, but also about the danger that it can engender against a “healthy and good” learning of a foreign language. This situation seems quite logical. To reject the effectiveness of translation in perfecting a language is to go against the scientific works dealing with this issue. It is also to deprive the student of his own intellectual strategies of learning a foreign language at a time when his needs and abilities have to be respected, as the principles of the new pedagogy claim.
All recent studies on the process of acquiring a foreign language consider that there is a general mechanism that uses the mother tongue and escapes from the learner’s consciousness. Researchers speak of the existence of intermediate languages: a set of structures and semantic values transferred from one “a well-known language” to another “less well-known”. Translation, therefore, whether we like it or not, plays an important role in the structuring and evolution of these intermediate languages that facilitate the learning of a foreign language.
However, if we take into account the multidisciplinary nature of translation and its communicative function, the teaching / learning of translation must aim at both linguistic competence (the language and its rules) and translation competence ( translation techniques, documentation, research, etc.). To learn this means of communication that is translation, one must first understand the ST statements and re-express them adequately according to the conditions of communication. And the practice of translation according to this principle can only accumulate and improve the communicative competence of the learner.
This is the principle adopted by the communicative method in teaching foreign languages. According to the communicative method, translation is an authentic activity, since it is on the one hand, practiced constantly in real life, outside the classes, and on the other hand, it is the only activity in relation with the foreign language. This leads us ultimately to the following question:
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Then, how to strengthen language skills through translation?
Between the “usefulness of translation” and the “unfortunate way of its practice in traditional methods of language teaching”, there must be the view of rehabilitating or restoring pedagogical translation. The didactic research that actually aimed at the restoration of educational translation was inspired by “enunciative linguistics” and the “pedagogy of translation” implemented in the training of professional translators. The first does not only focus on the language system (vocabulary + syntactic rules), but also focuses on the actualization of the language to produce discourses in a well-defined communication situation. On its part, “the pedagogy of translation” advances that “Translate means to understand” to “make understood”.
This recourse to translation into language classes is, additionally, accompanied by modifications in the objectives of the practice, the method of work and on its content.
According to this new vision, and for pedagogical purposes, the translation activity will make the student aware of the lexical and grammatical specificities of each language, within a communicative context. Translation allows the student to conceptualize the grammar of each of the two languages. It is necessary, at this stage, to speak of a process of active language learning, and not that of a normative grammar sustaining.
From a communicative perspective, the practice of translation is reviewed from a “constructivist” angle. To translate, one must understand the meaning of the text submitted to translation. “Understanding” means, according to the Piagetian paradigm, the “construction” of meaning by a set of interactions of the learner with the external environment, and with the aid of his prior knowledge. Knowledge is, according to this psychological movement, a process before being a result.
The pedagogical translation that we defend does not concern sentences in isolation, out of context. The intended translation, similarly with the professional translation, must be practiced on texts that convey meaning. This practice has to move away from the word and the sentence to determine the unit of meaning as an entity, it has to avoid the linguistic correspondence to establish the semantic equivalence, as imposed by the enunciative context with all its components: linguistic, cultural and social. This will allow learners to be sensitive to the different realities or worlds of each language and to the cultural strength of each of them. In other words, we aspire to a practice that is part of a communication strategy: to know what to translate, for whom to translate and how to do it?
Among the activities that can explain the spirit of pedagogical translation, and that can go along with the desired development, we can mention the exercise of “Commentary on Version” proposed by Ballard (1988, p.153) and that of “Discourse with Discourse” of which the essence is inspired by Widdowson (1983, p.85).
With the objective to restore the practice of translation in the foreign language class, Ballard, (1988, p.133-135) proposes the exercise of version commentary. An exercise in which the student:
– Compares an original text and one of its translations.
– Identifies differences between the two texts in terms of: lexical, grammatical, semiotic variations…etc.
– Comments on these differences.
For the author, this activity is necessary and useful. It is necessary because it attracts attention and develops precision. It is useful because it makes it possible to, first, shape an idea about the specificities of each linguistic system, and then discuss the choice of translation equivalences, and not those of linguistic correspondences.
As for speech-to-speech or Discourse to Discourse activity, it consists in applying well-chosen exercises to a speech in a foreign language. These exercise should help to develop two discourses simultaneously, one in the mother tongue, the other in the foreign language. The activity thus leads the student to the easy movement from reception (reading) to production (writing).
Proposals in this respect are, in fact, numerous. But what must be kept in mind is that the pedagogical value of translation would be all the better if it could contribute to the development of the student’s bilingualism. When the learner takes the habit of expressing ideas in a foreign language far from the influence of his mother tongue and he makes efforts not to attribute to a “signifier” in the foreign language to the “signified” in his mother tongue. Thanks to this practice, he will gradually prove the ability to speak and write fluently and correctly in a foreign language, the way he would in his mother tongue.
CONCLUSION
The goal of translation practice for non-specialists is to found the language skills of the learner, to refine their thematic and cultural knowledge and to encourage them to think and to react. What is necessary, then, is a thoughtful pedagogy of translation that reconciles the didactic objective, the cognitive content and the social reality of the learner.
From this brief overview on translation and learning a foreign language, it is possible to say that any study on translation in a theoretical and / or didactic context could only be beneficial for all the partners of the teaching act. : Learners, teachers, and also managers and all pedagogical members. Translation remains that communication medium which crosses language barriers; it remains also a plain factor of openness towards other realities and cultures.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ballard, M., Le commentaire de version, in Meta, Vol. 33, n° 3, pp. 341-349, 1988
Delisle, J., Translation: An Interpretive Approach, (L’Analyse du discours comme méthode de traduction) (Partie I), Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1988. Translated by :Patricia Logan et Monica Creery
Drugan,J., Quality in Professional Translation, Assessment and Improvement, Bloomsbury, London, 2013 pp.81-82
Grellet, C.F., A handbook of literary terms, Vol.1, Hachette, Paris, 1996
Jackobson, R., Word and Language Selected Writings, Walter & Company KG, 1971
Laviosa Sara, Translation and Language Education, Pedagogic Approaches Explored, Routeledge, U.K., 2014
Sweet Henry, The Practical Study of Languages, Oxford Press, London, 1972
Widdowson, H. G. , Teaching Language as Communication, Oxford University Press, 1983