Translation as a process and translation as a product in teaching translation

Resumen

Translation teaching has been traditionally used in some philology degree courses as a tool to teach language skills. This circumstance, however, should not be at odds with producing an acceptable translation. In this study I intend to analyse whether this can be achieved by incorporating extratextual information in the wording of a translation assignment. The results produced by a group of philology students show that the linguistic decisions they took were clearly dictated by the extratextual factors of the English source texts at hand. Even though further research whould be necessary in order to sustain this claim, this tentative approach intends to shed light on the long-discussed issue of to what extent language teaching needs to be taught in translation teaching. This study hints that translation teaching within any degree course should incorporate extratextual information as it has a bearing on the final phrasing of the translation.