Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Translation In The Russian Language Classroom: Coming In From The Cold, Brian James Baer, Tatyana Bystrova-Mcintyre

Russian Language Journal

For the past several decades, translation and interpreting have been largely excluded from the communicative language classroom—and not without reason. In traditional foreign language classrooms, “literal” or close translation was often used as a comprehension check or as part of a vocabulary or grammar drill, divorced from real-world context. This in turn encouraged students (and, on some rare occasions, foreign language teachers) to view language proficiency—and, by extension, translation competence—as a kind of linguistic matching game.