12

The Role of Translation in

Language Learning and Teaching
H. G. Widdowson

It is a widespread assumption that the objective of second language teaching

is to focus the learners’ attention exclusively on the particular features of
the second language so as to get them to approximate to native speaker
competence as closely as possible. In this way of thinking, translation, or
any reference to the learners’ first language, is to be avoided as at best a
distraction from, at worst a disruption of the learning process. Translation
can however be understood as general interpretative activity that is always
involved in the realisation of pragmatic meaning within as well as across
languages. An alternative way of conceiving of language pedagogy would
be to naturalise learning by encouraging rather than inhibiting learners’
engagement in this pragmatic process by drawing on all the linguistic
resources at their disposal and to give credit to what learners achieve in
making meaning, no matter what non-conformist or linguistically hybrid
form it takes. The objective then would be defined in terms not of some
illusory and unattainable native speaker competence but of a capability for
‘languaging’, for using linguistic resources to pragmatic effect.

12.1 Introduction

As its title indicates, this chapter sets out to consider the relationship
between three activities: translation, language learning and language
teaching. Nobody doubts that there is a relationship between the
second and third of these, although as the history of language peda-
gogy makes clear, nobody seems to know just what this relationship
should be. In the case of translation, the question is whether there
is any relationship at all. In one entrenched tradition of pedagogic
thinking, as Cook has pointed out (Cook 2010), translation has been

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J. House (ed.), Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
 Translation in Language Learning and Teaching 223

outlawed not only as an irrelevance but an impediment to language

teaching. His book presents a convincing argument for its methodo-
logical reinstatement as a classroom activity. Cook’s focus of attention
(and the title of his book) is translation in language teaching (TILT)
and this of course involves a consideration of language learning. He
comments (2010: xxi):

I could as easily have called this book ‘Translation in Language

Learning’ and used the acronym ‘TILL’. ‘Teaching’ and ‘learning’ may
not be reciprocal verbs, like ‘give’ and ‘take’ – it is possible to teach
someone who learns nothing from being taught  – but the two do
generally go together. There is no significance in my choice of TILT
rather than TILL. The book is about both.

My own view, as will become apparent, is that it is precisely the

assumption of reciprocity – that the two ‘generally go together’ – that
needs to be questioned. For it generally also implies the presupposition
that there is a dependent unilateral relationship between them: teach-
ing is the cause and learning the effect, that in talking about TILT one
is talking implicitly or explicitly about TILL at the same time. A simi-
lar cause–effect relationship is assumed in the extensive literature on
task-based activities which are sometimes said to constitute task-based
language teaching (TBLT) and sometimes task-based language learning
(TBLL): the second is taken to be the necessary consequence of the first
(see, for example, Ellis 2003).
But this relationship is not a necessary or natural one. One might
argue, indeed, that it is teaching which depends on learning rather
than the other way round. We cannot be said to teach anything unless
it is learned, but of course we learn all kinds of things without being
taught, including language. This is readily accepted in the case of our
L1. There seems no reason to suppose that the same does not apply
to the L2. To be sure the data we draw on to learn our L1 is in some
degree selected and organised by our social environment and the
conventions of upbringing. These provide conditions for learning, but
they do not determine what we learn. In the case of L2 pedagogy, on
the other hand, what is taken to be learnt is so determined in that it is
required to conform to what is taught. It is recognised that the process
of independent learning takes place, as is clear from the ‘errors’ that
learners ‘commit’ but even when these are seen positively as evidence
of learning, the assumption remains that the learning has eventually