The thesis offers a critical exploration of the relationship between translation and L2 teaching. It aims to raise awareness of the fact that throughout the years, translation’s “visibility” as an L2 teaching tool has been compromised, in spite of its continuous presence in the L2 teaching field. In discussing this argument, the thesis sets out to explore three questions: how has the relationship between translation and L2 teaching evolved; what have been the major contributing factors to its invisible status, especially in the L2 teaching field; and, finally, has the dispute between translation and L2 teaching been settled?
The thesis sets out to answer these questions by integrating insights from the fields of SLA, Bilingualism, Sociolinguistics and Translation Studies, and bringing them into critical conversation. In so doing, it first questions the fact that the Grammar-Translation Method is traditionally regarded as the beginning of translation and L2 teaching. The thesis calls for a different approach that portrays the relationship between them as a continuum. It considers translation as a diachronic L2 teaching approach which, in spite of being constantly present in the teaching field, has not always been visible. The thesis examines, next, the progress of translation and L2 teaching from a pedagogical and socio-political perspective. To that end, it holds a critical discussion on how monolingualism has been a catalytic force for translation’s invisibility in the L2 teaching field, despite efforts by the scholarship to expose this invisible status.
On that ground, the thesis discusses, further, the assumption that recent challenges of the monolingual teaching bias, and the subsequent development of post-monolingual teaching approaches, could effectively resolve the long-standing controversial relationship between translation and L2 teaching. Amid this theoretically positive shift for translation and L2 teaching, the thesis still identifies traces of the relationship’s “invisibility”. It is ultimately argued that the recent negative criticism towards translation in L2 teaching does not currently represent an issue of redefining pedagogical translation. Instead, it has primarily turned into a matter of defining the concept of translation per se within the field of L2 teaching. Consequently, this calls for the discipline of Translation Studies to contest the current criticism, and to help create a portrait of translation and L2 teaching based on a newly defined basis.