_Op. Cit.: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies_
APEAA - Portugal
2000 (themed) Issue: Pedagogical Translation and Translation Studies
Announcement and Call for Papers
For centuries the learners’ mother tongue and formal grammar went hand in
hand in foreign-language teaching and learning. A time came when
explanation of rules and meanings began giving way to the translation of
words and sentences from the foreign language.
In the 1880s translation into the foreign language made its appearance and
soon became the favourite strategy in the FL classroom. That was the
grammar-translation method in its purest expression.
Regrettably the progress made by learners in the practical use of the
foreign language was far from satisfactory, and a good number of voices
were heard protesting against the conservative idle grammar-translation
method, and new methods were proposed in its place. Thus the road began
being paved for what would be later called the Direct Method. Defenders of
the latter proposed the banishment of the learners’ L1 from classroom and
condemned translation both from and into the foreign language. A growing
number of teachers adopted the new rules, and pedagogical translation -
though far from totally abandoned by many of the practising teachers - was
seen as a harmful device in foreign-language learning until very recently.
In the past few years, however, more and more methodologists are
reanalyzing the role of pedagogical translation, and its condemnation is
losing popularity among teachers.
Alongside pedagogical grammar, and quite independently from it, translation
as a way of overcoming linguistic barriers was practised almost everywhere.
Learning spread through the Western civilization because translation made
it possible and easier.
Translators, however, from Jerome to Ezra Pound, were individuals who
devoted some of their time to translating for sheer intellectual pleasure,
apart from some very few exceptional cases of professional translating
centres as was the Toledo school engaged in the translation of Arabic texts
into Latin in the late Middle Ages.
Until very recently the academia looked at translation with prejudice, and
nobody would approve of a translation course in his/her university. The
situation, however, has been changing over the past thirty/forty years, and
most universities are now proud for training translators.
The time has come for a serious evaluation of the two recent changes
referred above, i.e. the return of pedagogical translation and the
explosion in translation studies. Will the return of translation to
foreign-language classes make learning more effective? Are recently trained
professional translators better than their amateur predecessors were?
Op. Cit. is calling for papers that answer these questions.
Position papers (3,000-4,000 words) and full papers (7,000-8,000 words) in
Word for Windows (6.0 or 7.0), author-date style, to
Prof Manuel Gomes da Torre
mop88622@mail.telepac.pt
or to
Prof Carlos A M Gouveia
camg@esoterica.pt
the editor
ferpi@mail.telepac.pt
Deadline: September 30, 1999
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