or professional growth, as some teachers find their way to new philosophical positions, not by first entertaining new principles. but rather by trying out new techniques.”
The view on translation approaches and techniques is not thoroughly elaborated because translation studies investigate what translation means and not so much the ways translation could be used for learning purposes. Translation is regarded as a rather limited method due to the narrow perception of what it is considered and not what it could offer. In the last decade, researchers moved towards qualitative inquires on translation, after spending years on empirical descriptions and behavior of translation approaches. Critical interpretations of these approaches seek to connect the translator with historical contexts.
Nida considered that there are two systems of translating: one is the application of established rules for translating (strictly designed), the second is more elaborated, split in a) analysis of the message to its grammatical structures and meanings of the words, b) mental transfer from one language to the other and c) restructuring, where the transferred message is restructured to be comprehensible in the target language.
The current need is to make a clear distinction between translation as a facilitator to understand a text in a different language (real translation) and translation as an activity in second language teaching/learning processes (pedagogical translation). As Becerra-Solis and Aguado-Marques stated , the distinction between the two is clear because, while in real translation the translated product is the goal of the process, in pedagogical translation, the translated product is the means to achieve knowledge of L2.
The role of translation in teaching a second language is emphasized in several known approaches and techniques like Grammar-Translation Method, Audio-Lingual Method or the Communicative approach, but not only. There are different approaches focused on translation and on the result of translation in achieving proficiency in a second/foreign language, but Nida identified two problems in all approaches to theories of translating:
1) The tendency of researchers to underline the benefits of a certain approach and its applicability
2) The main concern on denotive meanings rather than on associative ones
Still, after a period of time, these methods and approaches’ distinc