From 'liberal translators' to 'competent translaters' - translation as an overarching diagnostic activity in an ESP/ESAP course

Abstract

The paper points to some possible advantages of translation as a language activity in the ESP/ESAP classroom as well as to its role in bringing to the fore some aspects of language use that may not be always explicitly addressed by the commonly used tasks in communicative language teaching. Attention is thus drawn to the role of translation in diagnosing students' language competences with the aim of improving them and eventually developing their overall reading comprehension. Most conclusions have been reached on the basis of the authors' extensive experience in teaching students of different disciplines and with varied L2 proficiency levels at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade, and, more specifically, on the basis of the results obtained through the analysis of a large corpus of students' translations in the fields of pedagogy, anthropology and history, tentatively representing the social sciences-humanities spectrum. As well as being an indication of the aspects of L2 that need to be additionally focused on, the common errors serve to substantiate the rationale behind the use of translation in an ESP/ESAP course.