Fostering metalinguistic awareness: Role play, pragmatics and L2 literary translation

This paper illustrates how combining role play with the use of literary texts in the university classroom can help students develop a metalinguistic awareness of differences between linguistic systems and an ability to translate more successfully by stimulating a pragmatic, plurilingual perspective on language use. Drawing on action-research with students who followed courses in Italian-English translation at a post-B2/C1 level, I show how literary texts can be harnessed pedagogically through a process of deictic re-anchoring which guides learners to experientially engage with the fictional world of the text. This technique is illustrated through a task-based pedagogic design intended to help students learn to render ‘the future in the past’. As they explore how to translate reported speech from Italian into English, students become aware of and develop strategies to deal with hypo-differentiation, i.e. a failure to recognize and use appropriately the full range of target structures that constitute ‘translation equivalents’. Implications for the design and delivery of language and translation courses at the university level are discussed