TRANSLATION STUDIES AND THE INTEGRATED MODERN LANGUAGES DEGREE

Abstract

This article examines the role of translation studies within the modern languages undergraduate degree course. It explores three possible goals that the teaching of translation might serve: as an aid to language learning, as a subject in its own right, and as a means of integrating the language learning with the cultural or area studies which make up the rest of the modern languages course. The article investigates the origins of translation as a teaching method, its fall from favour in the era of communicative language teaching in the late twentieth century, and its renaissance in the last decade due to the extraordinary recent growth in postgraduate courses in translation studies at UK higher education institutions and across anglophone academia, in order to ask what the purpose and possibilities of the subject might now be.

Keywords: translation, undergraduate, postgraduate, communicative language teaching, degree programme