What’s Translation Got to Do with It?: How Translation Activities in the Composition Classroom Can Cultivate Recognized Moments of Rhetorical and Cultural Awarenesses in Student Writers

Abstract

Translation has historically played a central role in the field of rhetoric and composition; despite this, the fields of translation studies and rhetoric and composition have not historically engaged with one another or drawn from each other’s pedagogies. Recently, there has been interest in the use of translation in the composition classroom (Fraiberg; Horner and Tetreault; Milu; Wang), which may in part be attributed to the burgeoning scholarship around translingualism and translingual pedagogies (Canagarajah; De Costa et al.; Horner and Tetreault) in the field of rhetoric and composition. This dissertation is situated at the intersection of translation studies, language studies, and rhetoric and composition, and catalogues a study conducted in two online sections of ENGL 307 Business Writing. This study integrates translation activities into the composition classroom with an aim to cultivate recognized moments of rhetorical and cultural awareneness in student writers. The data, though limited, reveals that students were experiencing changes in their rhetorical and cultural awarenesses as a result of translation activities and reflections. This dissertation argues that a translation pedagogy for the composition classroom (TPCC) can be critical, if the teacher enacting it is explicit in her reasons for doing so. For a critical TPCC to be effective, students must be made aware of how their participation in translation work has ideological implications and of how each choice sediments and contributes to a certain ideological narrative. This dissertation also argues that a TPCC can also be a critical pedagogy when/if viewed through a feminist lens. Feminist translation scholars offer ways of approaching and performing translation that disrupts domestication vs. foreignization binaries and repositions the translator in full view. This research aligns with Horner and Tetreault who argue, “While it may not seem initially obvious how questions about translation enter into a space like the composition classroom, we argue that translation offers a particularly rich framework for work in composition insofar as it brings to the fore the negotiation of language difference as well as ideologies of language difference that a translingual approach calls for. Writing instruction has always been institutionally structured as a key site for the negotiation of language ideology” (“Translation as” 17).