This article aims to report an experiment carried out in a foreign language classroom using translation as a cognitive strategy able to correct interlanguage problems, especially those visible in the systematization or stabilization phases. The activity consisted of leading students to examine and compare a set of sentences produced by students in the classroom with sentences taken from texts published in magazines and newspapers in English, in order to develop the student’s awareness of the differences between mother tongue and foreign language with regard to structure, syntax, lexis, and semantics. By means of a contrastive analysis of the sentences, it was hoped that typical errors of transference and interference could be corrected, so that, this way, fossilization was prevented and the English language presented by the students could seem less Portuguese-like and could become a more idiomatic one.