Book review
Alan Duff. Translation
Oxford University Press, 1989. 160 pp. (in the series Resource Books for Teachers, ed. Alan Maley).

Reviewed by Francis R. Jones
University of Exeter
Table of contents

For many years language-teaching theory (as opposed to language-teaching practice) has exiled translation from the classroom. The grammar-translation method—which explains linguistic structures in the mother tongue, fleshes them out with an unsystematic body of lexis defined through mother-tongue equivalents, and then proceeds to translate sentences and paragraphs into and out of the mother tongue—was widely attacked by audio-lingual theoreticians in the sixties on the grounds that the strong mother-tongue presence interfered with the formation of the second-language "habits", and that its concentration on writing did little to promote oral fluency.

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References

Ellis, Rod
1985 Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hartmann, R.R.K.
1980 Contrastive Textology: Comparative Discourse Analysis in Applied Linguistics. Heidelberg: Julius Groos.Google Scholar
Jones, Francis R.
1989 “On Aboriginal Sufferance: A Process Model of Poetic Translating”. Target 1:2.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar