Translation in foreign language teaching: A case study from a functional perspective

• The functional approach can sensitize students to the relationship between context and text.
• Students face various translation problems when translating different texts.
• Translation problems can result from various individual difficulties.

There is little research available on using translation as a tool to develop students’ translation and communicative competence in foreign language programmes. This paper aims to fill this gap by reporting the results of a localized empirical study, using a functionalist theoretical framework. After a pre-translation source text analysis of three texts with EU topics, data were collected by two methods: a linguistic analysis of the student translations of these texts to identify and analyze the most common translation problems, and semi-structured interviews to explore their individual difficulties. The results show that a functional approach can sensitize students to the relationship between text and context, which can develop their cultural and textual awareness. Since the students’ translation problems stem from various individual difficulties, exploring and analyzing them can provide valuable additional information for the teacher about the translation process.