Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom

The main aim of this book is to provide teaching ideas that can be adapted to different learning environments and that can be used with different language combinations. The pedagogical approach and the activities, tasks and projects are based on Communicative, Humanistic and Socioconstructivist principles: the students are actively involved in their learning process by making decisions and interacting with each other in a classroom setting that is a discussion forum and hands-on workshop.Clear aims are specified for the activities, which move from the most rudimentary level of the word, to the more complicated issues of syntax and, finally, to those of cultural difference. Moreover, they attempt to synthesize various translation theories, not only those based on linguistics, but those derived from cultural studies as well.
This volume will be of interest to translation teachers, to foreign language teachers who wish to include translation in their classes, to graduates and professional translators interested in becoming teachers, and also to administrators exploring the possibility of starting a new translation programme.

Bettina Migge, University College Dublin, in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Vol. 23:2 (2008):
This book is a truly unique ethography providing an unusually detailed and emperically grounded insight into the organization of knowledge and its social distribution in a Caribbean community. Applying a conversation analytical approach, Sidnell strikingly demonstrates how everyday social practices and the social structure of a community are accomplished on a turn-by-turn basis. [...] This study accomplishes two important things. In relation to everyday social practices, it reveals how they are interactionally achieved, contribute to the community's social structure, and how members of the community make sense of them in unfolding talk. Methodologically, it strikingly demonstrates how close interactional analysis of the sort practiced by conversation analysts is vital for overcoming received and often biased notions about the social life of non-western communities. Sidnell's study sets new standards for doing ethnography, and rehabilitates the importance of close attention to social interaction and language in this enterprise.