Fostering metalinguistic awareness: Role play, pragmatics and L2 literary translation

This paper illustrates how combining role play with the use of literary texts in the university classroom can help students develop a metalinguistic awareness of differences between linguistic systems and an ability to translate more successfully by stimulating a pragmatic, plurilingual perspective on language use. Drawing on action-research over a 3-year period with students who followed courses in Italian-English translation at a post-B2/C1 level, it shows how 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. This technique is illustrated through a task-based pedagogic design intended to help students learn to render ‘the future in the past’. As they explore how to translate reported speech/thought from Italian into English, students become aware of and develop strategies to deal with a common problem encountered by novice translators, i.e. hypo-differentiation, i.e. a failure to recognize and use appropriately the full range of target structures that constitute potential ‘translation equivalents’ of a given source language structure. Implications for the design and delivery of language and translation courses at the university level are discussed