L’uso della traduzione in una classe di LS: Una questione ancora aperta o da riaprire?

Abstract

With the advent of the communicative approach, in the mid 1980s, the issue of the use of translation in foreign language classes moved to the periphery of the linguistic debate. For a long time, Applied Linguistics and foreign language teaching handbooks ignored the matter as a given; that is, the scientific community simply accepted that working with translation in the classroom is unnecessary and even inadvisable. The proposed article intends to readdress this issue, taking into account not only linguistic factors, but also the ideologically and politically relevant reasons involved in this discussion, and also reappraising the advantages of translation as a didactic technique. Initially, the article traces the ways in which foreign language teaching has approached translation ever since the seventeenth century. The article also demonstrates that, despite the fact that translation has gradually lost ground as an efficacious technique for teaching a foreign language, teachers still often resort to the mother tongue, and students often approach the studied foreign language by way of translation. The article concludes with a series of didactic activities that contemplate the use of translation in the foreign-language classroom.