Teaching English-Spanish contrastive analysis through translation

Abstract

For the past few years, the Department of Modern Languages at the University of León (Spain) has been offering a course on English-Spanish Contrastive Linguistics focusing on explicit instruction in L1-L2 differences. The directionality is from English into Spanish, since our students are native speakers of Spanish enrolled in an English degree. This has proved to be helpful in raising learners' awareness of the one-to-many relationships between meaning and form across language boundaries and also in improving their translation performance. The course makes use of a corpus-based methodology to develop a number of tasks oriented towards highlighting the grammatical areas that are particularly problematic from an English-Spanish perspective and may cause difficulties in the improvement of the translation skills of our students. After a short theoretical introduction to the field of Contrastive Linguistics, a top-down functional approach is employed to deal with textual contrasts and contrasts at various lexico-grammatical levels. The main purposes of this ‘contrast-through-translation’ course are to offer students the opportunity a) to explore the semantic and pragmatic cross-linguistic relationships between English and Spanish at different levels of analysis, and b) to improve both their understanding of the source language (English) and their accuracy in the production of the target language (Spanish).