Where Translation Studies Lost the Plot: Relations with Language Teaching (original) (raw)

Recent renewed interest in the role of translation activities in language teaching calls for dialogue between the two disciplines. In framing this dialogue, translation scholars should reflect on the history of their own discipline and reassess the opposition to language learning found in the 1980s and 1990s. In politically turning away from language learning, translation scholars left the field open for immersion and communicative teaching methods that ideologically shunned translation from the classroom. In insisting that there are many modes and varieties of translation, scholars should also critically reassess the binary categories that have dominated the history of translation theory: models with many possible translation solutions should serve us better in rebranding translation for the language-learning community. In so doing, however, translation scholars may need to break the unspoken pact that they have developed with the translation professions, opening to a view where everyone translates, not just professionals, and everyone can be educated to translate better. Translation Studies vs. language teaching