One idea that I always convey to my translation students when they start their first general translation course is that you cannot be a good translator if you are not a good writer first. Mastering both the source and target languages is a necessary competence to successfully undertake translation studies, which means that you not only have to be a good writer but also, obviously, a good reader, with all that this implies from the perspective of discourse studies. This principle serves as a fundamental guide when planning practical translation classes.
According to Calsamiglia Blancáfort & Tusón Valls (1999), to speak or to write is to construct textual pieces with a determined purpose in interdependence with a context that is, at the same time, linguistic, local, cognitive, and sociocultural. Hence, the communicative success of a text depends on the competence of its issuer in the language in which it is produced, while also taking into account the ability to communicate within a given culture, discursive tradition, and situation of enunciation.
As a professor of translation, it has always struck me that, regardless of the linguistic skills of the students who come to my translation courses, in most cases, when they are faced for the first time with the task of converting a text written in the source language into one in the target language, their concentration and efforts are channeled so strongly toward the search for linguistic equivalences between the two languages that, as a consequence, they neither read the source text nor write the target text properly (which is the criterion for success that guides the planning of my lessons). Sometimes students even surprise themselves with the difficulty they suddenly experience in analyzing the texts they receive or with the low linguistic-discursive quality of the texts they produce, given that it does not correspond to what they would be able to accomplish on their own if they were not immersed in a translation situation.
Apparently, this is a relatively widespread phenomenon that has already been described by specialists in Translation Didactics. According to Gile (2009), when students begin studying translation, most of them pay attention only to the linguistic aspects and, upon receiving a text, simply try to find the closest linguistic equivalent without being aware of the role of the translation operation as such, leaving aside the communicative aspect, which is essential for reading the source text and writing the target text.
Faced with this reality, I have considered the need to reverse it when designing student tasks, not only through explanations about the communicative nature of translation or the simulation of translation assignments that allow students to become more aware of the pragmatic elements of both the source text and the translated text, but also through specific exercises that help them strengthen their discursive skills with the aim of effectively developing their translation competence. What I always propose is the inclusion of unconventional exercises in the translation classroom.
I would like to draw attention to the difficulty of overcoming the sentence as the primary unit of analysis in traditional translation exercises. In translation classes, students generally receive a source text that they must analyze and translate. In class, a transfer situation is generated in which different students read aloud parts of their translations, write them on the board, or project them onto a screen, which means that the units of analysis become sentences or paragraphs. As a result, translations are almost always analyzed sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph, with the consequence that the translated text is not examined as a single functional unit.
The fact that translated texts are not studied in their entirety means that linguistic mechanisms extending beyond the sentence, which are essential for textual cohesion, are rarely discussed. Discussions are often limited to the way a particular idea was formulated, without going beyond the sentence or paragraph. Moreover, because each student has probably produced a translation that differs considerably from the others, the formulations analyzed do not always fit together, preventing the class from collaboratively constructing a cohesive and acceptable translated text.
With these deficiencies in mind, as well as the need to strengthen the discursive skills that students tend to neglect when they begin translating, I decided to have a single student translate the source text so that the classroom transfer situation could revolve around the analysis of that translation in its entirety. The rest of the students can then focus on analyzing the text and proposing improvements or alternative solutions. This approach allows greater textual cohesion to be achieved while addressing translation problems at their source.
References
Calsamiglia Blancáfort, H. & Tusón Valls, A. (1999). Las cosas del decir. Manual de análisis del discurso. Ariel.
Gile, D. (2009). Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training. John Benjamins.