Liaison interpreting in the ELF classroom: a case study

Abstract

Leaving aside old prejudices against the use of translation in foreign language teaching, the new integrative approaches show how translation (and interpreting)-based activities can also potentially fall into the communicative task category. Liaison interpreting is one such and it is our aim in this paper to investigate how it works with a group of 4th year English Philology students at the University of Oviedo. Results being clearly positive, and taking into account such factors as the importance of the student's L1 in the learning process, the enormous array of translation-communication strategies produced and the intercultural dimension present in every translation context, we shall finish by arguing for the inclusion of this kind of activities in the L2 classroom.