Translation as a tool for language learning in undergraduate programmes: Are we making the most of it?

Translating is an activity still seen as a linguistic operation for teachers and undergraduates studying a language at Higher Education in the UK. Do our students know what they are expected to do when we give them a text to translate? Through my experience the majority just convey the message from one language into the other without having any knowledge about the context in which the text has been written or without even thinking about the function that their translations are going to fulfil in the target language, reducing the translation process to a mere linguistic (word-by-word) operation…but is that the message we really want to put across? Although our students are not trained to be professional translators, they have to be prepared to face a more competitive job market, emphasising the important role of the intercultural mediators in the globalised world we are living in. Consequently, it would be very helpful for our cohort of students to obtain a general practical idea of how translators, in the very early steps of their training proceed when translating a text, even if this activity is included within the language-learning framework. This presentation aims to provide a different idea on how to approach translation in Higher Education and how to incorporate this concept into the classroom with different activities