Abstract
After reading the final report of The First European Survey on Language Competences (ESLC 2011: 83), I thought it was challenging for me to write this paper, focusing on how translation can improve my students' language learning, in order to become aware of the EU terminology. On the one hand, in the Romanian educational system, both teachers' and students' frequent use of the target language (English) during lessons has positive impacts, in the sense that the more students and teachers speak the target language during lessons, the higher the score on the language testing. On the other hand, translation of texts containg EU terminology brings up two questions herein - Why becoming aware of E.U terminology? How do my students perceive the relation between translation and language learning in order to become aware of the EU terminology? I answered these questions by conducting an analysis, based on a two-fold approach: selecting texts from the Guide to Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3) and establishing a time frame for the students to translate the selected texts.
My selection of texts from the above mentioned guide is justified: the students are enrolled in the Computer Science Program and being language learners/users, their communicative language competence and awareness of EU terminology are to be activated in the performance of the various language activities, involving reception, production, interaction or mediation (in particular, translating from English into Romanian). Nowadays, mediation plays an important role in Europe, because it provides the normal linguistic functioning at EU level and, by adopting it, learners/students are able to mediate, through translating activities, between speakers of the two languages concerned, who cannot overcome the communication barrier. Moreover, I emphasized in the paper the following: becoming aware of the EU terminology, students not only become plurilingual, more interculturally aware, but they also enhance their linguistic and cultural competences.
To sum up, the analysis helped me draw a relevant conclusion: translations of texts containing EU terminology enrich the students'vocabulary, enhance their capacity for further language learning, as they already know and use terms from a specialised field (more precisely, they can cope with learning a language for specific purposes - ESP) and lead to greater openness to new cultural experiences (see also the study Translation and language learning: The role of translation in the teaching of languages in the European Union 1/2013: 27). |
Keywords
language learning, EU terminology, translation, mediation, linguistic competence |