While many professional translators believe the ability to translate is a gift that one either has or does not have, Allison Beeby Lonsdale questions this view. In her innovative book, she demonstrates how teachers can guide their students by showing them how insights from communication theory, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and semiotics illuminate the translation process.
Challenging long-held assumptions, she establishes a fascinating framework on which to base the structure of a professional prose-translation class. Her original contributions to the question of directionatliy and to the specific strategies of tranlsating are applicable to not only the teaching of translation from Spanish to English, but to other teaching situations and to other pairs of languages as well. She also reviews the latest attempts in translation theory to define and contextualize ideal translator competence, student translator competence, and general translation strategies.
Beeby Lonsdale completes her book by applying her conclusions to selecting and organizing the content of teaching translation from Spanish to English. She illustrates one or more of the basic translation principles through 29 teaching units, which are prefaced by objectives, tasks, and commentaries for the teacher, and through 48 task sheets, which show how to present the material to students.