Making Translation Communicative: Mediation in the Communicative Language Classroom

While translation was once a key component of language teaching, throughout the twentieth century, it largely gave way to methods and approaches with a greater focus on communicative competence. However, efforts have been made in the past few decades to return translation and more generally multilingual language learning to classrooms. In the European and particularly the German context, translation was revived again at the start of the 21st century in the form of mediation, a communicative translational task used in many classrooms today. This article addresses the origins of mediation in Europe and the sometimes conflicting definitions found in official educational documents and in the academic literature, compares it to other translation practices often encountered in the world language classroom, and provides examples of mediation tasks. The question of assessing such tasks is also addressed. This article aims to inform instructors using communicative approaches in the United States about mediation and demonstrate its advantages so that they might add another type of task to their pedagogical toolbox and include translation in a communicative way.