Towards a Communicative Approach to Translation: A Teaching Experience

Abstract

The article deals with the teaching experience in ‘Lingua Inglese e Traduzione I’ at Udine University in the first year of the Degree Course ‘Cultural Mediation’. The aim was to guide the students from a word-for-word approach to translation towards a communicative approach. A text is an act of communication and translation is a process to turn the message from one code into another across cultures. This account analyses and discusses a series of lessons in which mini-lectures were alternated with workshops, dealing with the following issues from translation studies: the problem of equivalence between languages, process in translation, text function and register. At the end of the article assessment criteria and first results are discussed.