Abstract

This paper illustrates how combining role play with the use of literary texts in the university classroom can help students develop a metalinguistic awareness of differences between linguistic systems and an ability to translate more successfully by stimulating a pragmatic, plurilingual perspective on language use. Drawing on action-research with students who followed courses in Italian-English translation at a post-B2/C1 level, I show how literary texts can be harnessed pedagogically through a process of deictic re-anchoring which guides learners to experientially engage with the fictional world of the text. This technique is illustrated through a task-based pedagogic design intended to help students learn to render ‘the future in the past’. As they explore how to translate reported speech from Italian into English, students become aware of and develop strategies to deal with hypo-differentiation, i.e. a failure to recognize and use appropriately the full range of target structures that constitute ‘translation equivalents’. Implications for the design and delivery of language and translation courses at the university level are discussed.

Keywords: literary translation, metalinguistic awareness, translation into 'non-mother' tongue, condiionals in reported speech - thought

1. Introduction

Literature possesses a unique power to transport the reader from his/her ordinary context into the world evoked by the text - in particular, those modes of narrative that adopt techniques of internal focalization to present the thoughts, experiences, and points of view of fictional characters. The present contribution illustrates how this characteristic of literary texts can be exploited in the translation classroom as a catalyst to help students develop a metalinguistic awareness of differences between linguistic systems and stimulate a pragmatic perspective on language use. The lesson I will share is intended to help students learn how to render ‘the future in the past’, an aspect particularly subject to negative interference in translating from Italian into English as a foreign/second language. It is the product of action-research (still in progress) with several cohorts of second and third year students majoring in English at the University of Siena’s Arezzo campus[1], but I believe can also be usefully adapted for students specialising in interpreting and translation. In it, role play and a task-based approach are exploited in order to vicariously involve students in the fictional world of the text. The aim of this experiential component, loosely inspired by transformative learning theories (see Mierowez, 1991 and colleagues) is to “uncouple” taken-for-granted mappings between language and context in order to – hopefully – establish new couplings and modus operandi in the target language. In addition to the specific objective of developing students’ ability to handle conditionals in reported speech in English with greater accuracy and pragmatic appropriateness, two broader learning outcomes are targeted: first, to enhance students’ skills in translating towards English as a ‘non-native’ language (which, given the lingua franca status and global dominance of English is, I argue, an institutional responsibility); secondly, to foster a metalinguistic awareness that is explicitly plurilingual in nature, by drawing students’ attention to areas of syntactic convergence and divergence between English and Italian in ways that encourage a flexible, problem-solving approach.

This paper aims to contribute to the current volume by engaging with and hopefully furthering three aspects of the wide-ranging legacy that Anna Ciliberti has bequeathed to those who know her or have had occasion to read her work: an attention to the potential for active language learning of “doing grammar in class” (“fare grammatica in classe”; Ciliberti, 2012; Ciliberti et al., 2003); her insistence – particularly in her recent book La grammatica: Modelli per l’insegnamento (2015) – on the necessity to assume a plurilingual perspective on language education, and her invitation to teacher-researchers to continually subject their classroom practice to scrutiny and critical reflection (2012). In what follows, my debts to both Guy Aston’s and Daniela Zorzi’s contributions to applied linguistics and language teaching in the Italian context will, I trust, be equally evident.

2. Rethinking translating towards the non-mother tongue in the language and translation classroom

Traditionally, teaching translation towards the non-mother tongue has been viewed with a certain suspicion. The strong version of this view is that in order to guarantee the production of top-quality translated texts, translators should work solely towards their ‘native’[2] language. Both psycholinguistic and cultural reasons are typically invoked: not only, it is claimed, do those translating towards their ‘native’ language have access to a broader repertoire of possible translation variants; they also possess a greater sensitivity to the collocational appropriacy of such variants thanks to their status as cultural insiders. This position is held by a number of professional organisations and by various translation theorists (for a discussion of the often implicitly expressed positions of several classic theorists, including Steiner, Newmark and Venuti, see Pokorn, 2000/2009). A weaker version of this view accepts the production of “service translations” by ‘non-native’ speakers of the target language, but draws the line at the translation of literary texts. The argumentative line presented by C. Dollerup is representative: “[in] literature the shortcomings of the non-native translator are obvious, for reading literature is an aesthetic experience which includes enjoyment of style and register, that is, of features which can be conveyed only by native speakers” (Dollerup, 2000/2009: 69) ^[3].

Both the strong and weak versions of this argument conspicuously neglect the importance of other factors that contribute to a successful translation, such as the more informed and in-depth understanding of the original text that a ‘native’ speaker of the source language often possesses (for an interesting take on this issue, see Zanettin, 2009). But beyond this fact, at least two very good reasons call for a reconsideration of translation towards the ‘non-mother’ tongue as an integral part of language education, at least at the university level. First, where English is concerned, both practical considerations and questions of fairness are at issue: in today’s global marketplace the need for translations into English out of any one language greatly exceeds the number required in the other direction and, to put it quite bluntly, there is no reason why a privileged position should be reserved for ‘native’ English speakers. A second reason is that the concerns about style and register that are commonly raised are probably overstated: given the status of English as a lingua franca, the target readers of many translations into English are international users of English, and there is growing evidence that fluent ‘non-native’ translators with bi- or multi-lingual repertoires may be particularly well positioned to gauge how such readers are likely to process and respond to translated texts (see various contributions to Taviano, 2013).

Should a reconsideration of translation towards the ‘non-mother’ tongue be extended to literary texts as well? Various cases of successful literary translation from lesser-used languages into English and other vehicular languages by ‘non-native’ English translators have been documented (Grossman et al., 2000/2009), but the practice is admittedly an exception, and, considering the rather limited market for literary texts, it would be difficult to support a decision to teach literary translation towards the ‘non-native’ tongue on practical or linguistic justice grounds. Such grounds are unnecessary, however, if one starts from the premise – by now well-established in language teaching circles – that helping students achieve communicative competence (including developing adequate translational skills) does not mean proposing only tasks that will be encountered in professional practice (for a well-reasoned reflection on this issue, see Stewart, 2008). Rather, as I will highlight in what follows, what matters is engaging students in pedagogically effective language use that draws on and exploits their plurilingual repertoires.

3. Theoretical and practical underpinnings of the pedagogical approach presented

Over the last thirty years or so, linguistic pragmatics has clearly demonstrated that the locus of meaning-making is situated language in use. This means that, while concepts like text type and text function are undoubtedly useful in translator training, the unit of analysis with which students ultimately need to engage is the individual text/discourse. How broadly in translation theory and practice one may wish to frame such engagement – rather restrictively, as in text linguistic approaches, or in wider cultural-semiotic terms – remains an open question (for a useful overview of the issue, see Hatim, 2001). I would argue that for pedagogic purposes an effective level of conceptualization is the ‘text-act’, which can conveniently be glossed, following Morini, as “all the performative forces displayed by a text”, “everything that a text aims to do and/or does in the world”[4].

A unique quality of literary texts, in particular fictional texts, is their capacity to imaginatively evoke other situations and contexts. This characteristic can be drawn on to help students problematize and rework existing cognitive schemes and modes of text processing. In other words, literary texts have a place in the classroom as ‘pre-texts’ for building language awareness and an ability to apply it in transposing text-acts from one language to another. One important psycholinguistic obstacle that student translators and cross-cultural communicators in general need to overcome are deeply-entrenched ways of linguistically representing degrees of epistemic certainty and agency. The following pedagogic design, which builds on a contrastive linguistics approach developed by two colleagues, Piera Sestini and Irene Loffredo, and has gradually been refined over several years of teaching translation courses to upper-intermediate and advanced undergraduate language majors, aims to address this hurdle. I present it here as an illustration of how translating literary texts can help Italian students learn to flexibly and appropriately render in English the so-called ‘future in the past’, i.e. reported thought or speech anchored in past time contexts. The broader aim of this design to encourage students to assume a pragmalinguistic perspective on the translation process, which I believe is an important component of learning to translate into English as a ‘non-native’ language. But first, a brief note on the translation problem in question.

4. A knotty translation issue: rendering the ‘future in the past’

Italian learners of English often encounter difficulties in acquiring a firm control of the ample range of means the language contains for expressing epistemic modality, i.e. the speaker’s/writer’s degree of certainty/uncertainty about the existence or future occurrence of given states or events. Even among highly-competent speakers who employ English daily for professional purposes, the use of the modal verbs and modalizing expressions available to express fine-grained distinctions concerning possibility/probability may diverge in various ways from that of ‘native’ speakers in similar contexts (Bubani, 2014). Where reports about the epistemic stance of other speakers/thinkers are involved, and particularly where over the course of talk/discourse these states are in a state of flux, these difficulties may be compounded. Translating narrative texts containing reported thought or speech can therefore prove particularly challenging, particularly where techniques such as free indirect discourse are employed, for two reasons.

The first is that translating reported discourse requires an ability to recognize (in reception) and render (in production) a deictic system that exhibits properties of dual articulation. Person, time and spatial reference need to simultaneously accommodate the perspectives of both the narrator and the person(s) whose speech or thoughts are being narrated, what Mortara Garavelli (1985, 1995) and Calaresu (2004) refer to as, respectively, locutore hic et nunc (Lo) and locutore citato (L1):

Nel discorso che riproduce al suo interno altri discorsi o parti di altri discorsi in forma diretta, si osserva [...] il caso tipico di un unico parlante che ricopre il ruolo di più locutori, o, in termini più tecnici, di un Lo (locutore hic et nunc) che assume momentaneamente il ruolo di uno (o più) L1 (locutore citato). Nel caso invece di un discorso in forma indiretta, Lo si limita a rievocare un L1 o a ‘raccontare’ il discorso di L1 senza però metterlo in atto direttamente ‘prestandogli’ la propria voce (come invece succede in un discorso diretto) (Calaresu, 2004: 86).

As communicative acts between writers and readers, all texts are characterized by deixis. In many text types, a single perspective may pervade the text as a whole: Richardson (1998), for example, gives the example of a tourist text in Spanish for Spanish tourists in which the Iberian peninsula is referred to as “nuestra peninsula”. Deictic perspective can also change dynamically as the text evolves. In this regard, Richardson observes that narrative texts typically contain a dual perspective: the so-called “focalizing point of view”, i.e. the position in terms of person, time and space from which the story is presented to the reader, and a so-called “focalized point of view”, which brings the spatial, temporal and personal coordinates of the narrated world into relief as the narration progresses. Quoting Segal, a key figure in deictic shift theory, he notes that:

[...] the reader tends to witness most events as they seem to happen [...] The events tend to occur within the mental model at the active space-time location to which the reader has been directed by the syntax and the semantics of the text (Segal, 1995, cit. in Richardson, 1998: 132).

A mental model, in other words, “is constructed at the moment of the reader’s reception of the text” (Richardson, 1998: 132). Grasping this dynamic property of narrative texts and rendering it in translation can be a challenge, whether the translator is working into or from his/her ‘native’ language.

A second, more specific difficulty comes into play when translating reported speech/thought from Italian to English: the verb systems of the two languages diverge in mapping epistemic states within this dually-articulated deictic space. The three examples presented in tab. 1, in which the conditions holding in each situation of enunciation have been made artificially explicit, illustrate how the verb system of English requires writers/speakers to be more explicit. Talk about possible events/states operates along two axes: fulfilment/non-fulfilment (whether or not the event or state mentioned is potentially realizable) and, in the case of potentially realizable events/states, the speaker’s degree of relative optimism/pessimism about whether or not the event/state will actually take place. While the verb systems of both Italian and English call for so-called ‘back-shifting’ in converting direct speech/thought into indirect speech/thought, the verb construction in reported speech in English retains the realizable/unrealizable distinction, while ‘cancelling out’ any indication about the reported speaker’s/thinker’s degree of optimism/pessimism regarding realizable events. In Italian, instead, neither of these distinctions is obligatorily encoded:  

Tab. 1: ‘Future in the past’: example sentences in Italian and English, with conditions of enunciation artificially specified

Examining the above summary in the light of insights from contrastive analysis, one might predict, that in translating reported thought/speech into English, Italian students will encounter syntactic interference (negative transfer) in the rendering of verb tenses due to hypo-differentiation, i.e. a failure to recognize that a single realization in the source language corresponds to more than one (in the case in point, two) variants in the target language[5]. And this is in fact the case. In what follows, I will try to highlight how performative features contained in literary texts can be drawn on in order to help student translators enter into the situation evoked in (so to speak) medias res, a procedure that can assist them in overcoming interference due to the above-mentioned morphosyntactic underdifferentiation of Italian with respect to English in the encoding of reported thought/speech.

5. A pedagogic design for learning to translate the ‘future in the past’

In literary texts the context of situation and characters’ cognitive and emotional states are usually not explicitly specified: indeed, the effectiveness of such texts often depends on the blurring of different levels of consciousness and subjectivity thanks to narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse. In translating reported speech/thought from Italian into English, translators are thus faced with the uncomfortable task of having to ‘saturate’ the original text to a certain degree, by choosing a rendering that frames the events described as realizable (possible or at least probable) or unrealizable (impossible/counter-factual). Doing so requires making inferences about cognitive or affective states that may have been specified elsewhere in the original text or been deliberately left underspecified (vague), a procedure that in turn involves a close reading of the original.

The following pedagogic sequence supports this inferencing process by introducing an experiential component into the translation process[6]. It does so by exploiting role play to activate a process of ‘deictic re-anchoring’ which helps students vicariously access characters’ internal states and make them their own. Part of the inspiration for this activity comes from Aston’s observations in his 1988 book Learning comity about the pedagogical potential of role play. Drawing on Goffman’s (1974) notions of “framing” and “changes of footing”, Aston highlights how role play involves a change in footing that reframes “what it is that is going on” (Goffman, 1974: 247, cit. in Aston, 1988: 242). One advantage of “frame breaks” of this sort in the language classroom is, Aston suggests, that they provide students with opportunities to “take time out to step back” (1988: 243) and reflect on their production.

In the following pedagogic sequence, the role play is preceded by two preparatory phases, one oriented towards helping students identify the context evoked by the text, the other focusing more specifically on the segments in reported speech in the Italian original. It is followed by the translation phase proper; in this fourth and final phase, metalinguistic labelling of what one is doing plays a prominent part:

Guided observation of the original Italian text or text excerpt:

1. warm-up task designed to help students identify the temporal and spatial reference points to which the text or text excerpt orients (questions or other task, e.g. producing a map charting a character’s movements or activities; filling out a chart in order to estimate how much time has elapsed in the narrated fictional world from the beginning to the end of the excerpt)

Preparation for role-play:

2. identification (in groups or collectively at class level) of segments in reported speech/thought
3. specification (again at group or class level) of who the reported speech belongs to (‘original speaker’: locutore citato (L₁))
4. reflecting aloud on the presumed cognitive/emotional state of the speaking/thinking subject (his/her degree of certainty, degree of optimism/pessimism about the future)

Role-play: entering vicariously (in medias res) into the situation being reported, through:

5. production of direct discourse in Italian (“what the speaker/thinker would have said/thought”)
6. production of ‘equivalent’ direct discourse in English[7]

Post role-play phase:

7. reflexive observation of one’s own discourse production (= ‘metalinguistic labelling’ of the English utterance(s) produced, including any other shifts in deixis or register appropriate in direct discourse in the context of situation evoked)
8. back-shifting of verb tenses in order to produce the appropriate form of indirect discourse in English
9. re-reading/discussion of the translation produced, in the light of students’ accumulated experience of similar target-language texts and/or one or more professional translations of the passage.

The role-play phase seems to be most effective when both the oral and visual/written channels are exploited. Asking individuals or pairs of students (the more extrovert or theatrically inclined) to stand up and perform the equivalent versions generated in direct speech, first in Italian and then in English, can have a powerful impact in highlighting the key role played by contextual expectations. Another strategy that colleagues and I have found useful is to have students work in pairs with worksheets that provide a visual representation of the process of ‘deictic re-anchoring’ proposed, i.e. the passage from indirect speech to direct speech in the source language and vice versa in the target language. Students tend to particularly appreciate the use of graphic supports such as the ‘thought’ or ‘speech balloons’ typically found in comics and graphic novels. The following two examples, containing segments respectively from Dino Buzzati’s Il deserto dei tartari (1940) and Carlo Cassola’s La ragazza di Bube (1960) illustrate this procedure (in proposing the activity in the classroom, the balloons in columns 2 and 3 and the final rendition in column 4 are presented either blank or in gapped form, according to the students’ level of proficiency)[8]:

Tab. 2. Translating the “future in the past” through deictic re-anchoring, example 1 (D. Buzzati, Il deserto dei tartari)

Tab. 3. Translating the “future in the past” through deictic re-anchoring, example 2 (C. Cassola, La ragazza di Bube)

In the Buzzati passage, the narrator’s statement that Drago “si sentiva nelle migliori condizioni di spirito” (“felt in high spirits”) supports the use of the first conditional in the direct speech renditions in Italian and English. In the Cassola passage, a close reading of the surrounding co-text (not included here for reasons of space) reveals that the protagonist continues to daydream and does not actually go out; this circumstance suggests that the use of the second conditional in the direct speech version is probably most appropriate. As students progressively compare the various direct and reported thought/speech renditions they have arrived at in translating a series of literary texts, they gradually build up a mental representation of the different affordances the Italian and English verb systems offer for expressing the ‘future in the past’; they also gradually acquire a better understanding of the importance of achieving a pragmatic ‘fit’ between individual translation choices and the ‘text-act’ as a whole. The following comment made by one student during the post role-play phase of a two-hour lesson in which both of the above-indicated texts were employed illustrates the meta-linguistic/meta-pragmatic awareness that, thanks to the opportunities for reflection on and experience of the text provided  by the preparatory tasks and subsequent role-play, some students are able to bring to bear on the translation process. In this phase I usually invite students to express themselves in either English or Italian, whichever choice is most comfortable for them; that the work involved in “uncoupling” and “recoupling” language and context is cognitively taxing is evident from this student’s choice to speak in Italian and his multiple hesitations and reformulations:[9]

Entrambi questi testi sono al passato, vengono riportati appunto i pensieri dei personaggi, riportati al passato, quindi ehm: nel fare la traduzione si rende necessaria utilizzare eh:: eh: l’uso del condizionale nel nel: discorso indiretto, [Teacher: uhm] al passato. [Teacher: uhm] Eh: il fatto di uhm: di collegare le distanze percorse dal personaggio e l’aspetto temporale con i sentimenti:: e le aspettative serve per l’appunto per individuare il tipo di uh condizionale da da utilizzare.

Both these texts are in the past tense, the thoughts of the characters are in fact reproduced in the past tense so erm: when translating it is necessary to use er: er: a conditional in indirect speech [Teacher: uhm] in the past. [Teacher: uhm] Er connecting the distances covered by the character and the passing of time with [his or her] feelings and expectations is necessary in order to figure out which type of conditional to use.

Although the process of deictic re-anchoring required to vicariously imagine themselves in the narrative context evoked can be difficult for some students, generally speaking the pedagogic sequence proposed (or variants thereof, which likewise draw on the performative opportunities offered by literary texts) proves useful in the translation classroom because of its capacity to systematically leverage the pragmatic dimension of texts.

6. Conclusions

This brief contribution has aimed to share with practitioners (teachers of translation and language teachers) and scholars (researchers in translation studies) a replicable heuristic that has proved successful in the classroom for solving a well-known difficulty encountered by novice translators: learning how to express the ‘future in the past’ in translating from Italian to English. It was also intended to provide a concrete illustration of how the analytic tools of linguistic pragmatics (in the present case, the notion of deictic re-anchoring) can be usefully incorporated into course design in language and translation studies, thus contributing to bridge the theory-practice divide. The procedure proposed helps students grasp the connection between morphosyntactic choices at the sentence/utterance level and pragmatic characteristics of the ‘text-act’ (literary text or excerpt thereof); more generally, it provides practice in foreseeing and resolving translation difficulties traceable to a mismatch between SL and TL language systems (in the present case, different levels of explicitness in the encoding of epistemic certainty in reported speech in Italian and English).

My broader aim in proposing this brief reflection has been to show how literary translation can be used to develop students’ metalinguistic awareness, while at the same time introducing (albeit vicariously) an ‘experiential’ component into the teaching/learning process. Constructivist approaches to classroom interaction have shown that involving students more actively in their own construction of meaning can facilitate more effective learning. Drawing on pragmatics to reconceptualise the use of literary texts in the translation classroom is one way to achieve this goal.

About the author(s)

Laurie Anderson is professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Siena (Italy). An applied linguist (B.A., Stanford; Ed.D., Columbia), her research in the areas of interpreting and translating focuses on healthcare interactions involving interpreters/mediators, Italian medical personnel and migrant patients and on the role that teaching/learning translation towards English as a second/foreign language can play in raising metalinguistic/metapragmatic awareness and enhancing learner autonomy. She is currently vice-director of AIM, an interuniversity centre dedicated to the analysis of spoken interaction in institutional settings and collaborates with the Max Weber Post-doctoral Programme at the European University Institute (Florence) as a member of the FIESOLE Group, a network of applied linguists from various European institutions dedicated to developing reflexive, transnational approaches to training for academic practice.

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