Translating Experience in Language Teaching Research and Practice

Abstract

This article explores the way native language teachers translate their linguistic and cultural experience in order to make it understandable to their students in the classroom. It examines how they report on this translation to researchers in two research projects conducted with two Chinese teachers (Kramsch and Zhang 2018) and one Japanese teacher/researcher (Shibahara and Kramsch forthcoming). Drawing on House (2017) and Pym (2010), it shows how the translation of experience takes place on three levels: the overt level of linguistic equivalence; the covert level of functional equivalence through a cultural filter; and the level of a cultural translation that has to be negotiated according to the subjective needs of the participants. These studies reveal that native language teachers tend to prefer overt over covert translations and that they engage in cultural translation not in order to explore but in order to overcome cultural difference. Such findings confront the field of applied linguistics with its age-old challenge as a field called to translate real-world problems of the practice into the language of research and vice-versa.