Intercultural Dimensions in Language Teaching – The Function of Pedagogical Translation
Intercultural Dimensions in Language Teaching – The Function of Pedagogical Translation

Summary/Abstract: Language teaching professionals acknowledge that teaching foreign languages aims at going beyond the acquisition of grammar content and the simple mastery of grammar skills, the weighty yearning being the accurate and appropriate use of language in order to communicate meaning in real situations. This is one of the reasons accounting for the long-lasting debate on the primacy of the most suitable language teaching method. The communicative language teaching approach has lately opposed to the traditional structural view and has included a wide range of methods mainly based on situational language teaching and audio-lingual methods so as to achieve a more complete communicative perspective. Whether written or oral, any communication act occurring in a language shall be achieved not only by using a range of linguistic forms, but also a set of strategies and linguistic forms adequate to concrete situations. One of the most characteristic feature of translation as a means of communicative language teaching is that it provides the systematic attention needed to be paid to both functional and structural aspects of language. It helps attaining one of the most important criteria of successful communication, namely not only conveying an intended meaning but also producing an accurate and appropriate stretch of discourse. By thoroughly pleading for implying translation as a convenient form of cross-cultural transmission of language in the process of foreign language learning/teaching, this article aims at highlighting the linking role translation plays informing the relationship between linguistic/structural and communicative forms, more often than not non-linguistic realities, as well as in raising learners’ awareness of meaning and cross-cultural differences.

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