Leveraging pragmatics in the translation classroom: Promoting active learning through literary translation towards the ‘non-mother tongue’

This paper illustrates how the use of literary texts in the translation classroom can act as a catalyst for helping students develop a metalinguistic awareness of differences between linguistic systems and an ability to translate more successfully by stimulating a pragmatic perspective on language use. Literature possesses a unique power to transport the reader from his/her ordinary context into the world evoked by the text  in particular, those modes of narrative that adopt techniques of internal focalization to present the thoughts, experiences, and points of view of fictional characters. Drawing on action-research with three cohorts of students who followed a bi-directional course in Italian-English/English-Italian translation at a C1 level, I show how this potential of literary texts can be harnessed pedagogically through a process of deictic re-anchoring, which guides learners to experientially engage with the fictional world of the text by shifting their point of view on events to coincide with the temporal and spatial localization of the ‘thinking/speaking subject’. This technique is illustrated through the discussion of a pedagogic design intended to help students learn how to render ‘the future in the past’, an aspect particularly subject to negative interference in translating from Italian into English. The paper highlights how a task-based approach that involves students vicariously in the fictional world of the text, supported by schematic representations of the different options available in the source and target language systems for expressing degrees of epistemic certainty/uncertainty, can help novice translators overcome syntactic interference due to hypo-differentiation, i.e. a failure to recognize and employ in contextually appropriate ways the full range of target structures that constitute ‘translation equivalents’ of a given structure. In closing, implications for the design and delivery of translation courses at the university level are discussed.