Going beyond the comfort zone: multilingualism, translation and mediation to foster plurilingual competence

Abstract

From watching a subtitled TV series to learning the lyrics of a popular song in a foreign language, media act as a mirror reflecting global multilingual realities. And yet, it is not always clear how teachers can exploit these multilingual experiences of learners in the foreign language classroom. Introducing a multilingual approach into the teaching of translation can show students how a given translation problem can be resolved in multiple ways in different languages. This contributes to promoting awareness of language diversity and fosters plurilingual competence, as students embark on the task of identifying similarities and differences among languages and recognising the link between languages and cultures. In this article, I present a unit of learning comprised of self-reflective and Multilingual Audiovisual Translation (MAVT) activities that can be used to integrate multilingualism into the foreign language curriculum as well as for teacher training purposes. Such a programme offers teachers several ways to develop both multilingual and plurilingual awareness while encouraging both teachers and students to go beyond their comfort zone as they tackle multilingual translations of texts.

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