The Art of Teaching Spanish: Second Language Acquisition from Research to Praxis

11 Spanish Second Language Acquisition: Applications to the Teaching of Professional Translation (and Interpretation)

11 Spanish Second Language Acquisition Applications to the Teaching of Professional Translation (and Interpretation) Sonia Colina University of Arizona 1.0Applications of Spanish Second Language Acquisition to the Teaching of Professional Translation (and Interpretation) T his chapter deals with the application of L2 (second language) research, in particular Spanish second language acquisition (SLA), to the teaching of translation and interpretation. By translation and interpretation I mean cross-linguistic and crosscultural communicative acts for meaningful purposes as opposed to, for instance, translation as a formalistic language exercise. Consequently, I do not deal with translation as a language teaching method or task as used, for instance, in grammar translation; rather, it is concerned with showing how the findings of second language acquisition can inform the teaching (and thus the practice) of professional translation.1 The emphasis will be on translation with some mention of interpretation.2 The chapter is divided in three sections. After a brief introduction, I focus on SLA applications to the teaching of translation by reviewing applications of general concepts first, followed by applications in the areas of reading and writing, pragmatics , discourse and transfer, testing and advanced proficiency, and think-aloud protocols. 1.1 Models of Competence and General Concepts A significant number of applications of SLA theory to translation studies and, in particular , to the teaching of translation and interpretation are concerned with general models of competence and theoretical concepts, such as communicative competence, the acquisition and learning distinction, and so on. These are, therefore, concepts drawn from general SLA theory and not restricted to SpanishSLA. Cao (1996) applies Bachman's (1991) model of the components of communicative language competence to the development of a model of translation proficiency (fig. 11.1) for the purpose of testing translator skills.What she terms transnational competence includes organizational competence in the source language (SL)and target language (TL),consisting of grammatical and textual competence, and pragmatic competence in SLand TL, made up of illocutionary and sociolinguistic competence. Cao also applies standard SLAassumptions about developmental stages to translation competence: She concludes that in her model of translation, proficiency follows a developmental path and can be acquired/developed/learned from zero to professional levels (339). 213 214 Colina Kiraly (1990) applies the acquisition-learning distinction in conjunction with the notion of communicative competenceto translator training.He points out that the dominant educational paradigm in translator training is still the equivalenceor linguistic transfer paradigm, in which students are expected to replace words and structures from one languageby words and structures in the other, with little regard for the purpose of the text. This means that a great deal of time is spent on learning and not enough on using language for self-expression or communication. Kiraly contends that in translator training students must be given opportunities for acquisition as well as learning and that "the translator needs to acquire communicative competence in addition to linguistic knowledge and linguistic manipulation skills" (214). He also proposes an acquisitionist model of the translation process (ibid.). In addition to reiterating the importance for a pedagogy of translation of the notion of communicative competence (see, for definitions, Savignon [1972, 1983] and many others after her) and of SLAproposals concerning the partial competencies comprised by communicative competence (Canale and Swain 1980), Kiraly (1995) stressesthe relevance of languageacquisition and languageteaching in general for translator education. He argues that the "integration of language competences in overall translation competence links translation skills instruction to foreign language teaching" (26).He contends that language teaching—and therefore SLA—can clarify the LI and L2 competencies that a professional translator must possess and use when translating. More specifically, he reminds translation researchers that the elaboration of translation pedagogy need not retrace the evolution of languageteaching, as translation scholars in the area of pedagogy can benefit from the knowledge acquired in second language acquisition.3 Kiraly (2000), drawing on the case of German translation schools in which translators must learn their foreign languages as well as translate, proposes a socioconstructivist approach (Vygotsky 1986, 1978) to translator education. He brings to the foreground the connection between language teaching and translation by arguingthat for a constructivist approach to translation to work, it must be preceded by the same type of approach to language learning. In a similar vein, Colina (2002) shows that many of the deficiencies of translation students today can be traced back to the type of language education that they were exposed to, in Figure11.1Cao'sModelofTranslationProficiency(1996) [3.145.130.31] Project MUSE (2024...