Time in translations. Tense and aspect through the lens of pedagogical translanguaging

The study explores how translation can be used as part of pedagogical translanguaging to facilitate multilingual learners’ understanding of the way tempo-aspecutal meanings are conveyed. Two sets of data are analysed, focusing on tense- aspect marking: (1) a novel excerpt originally written in Italian is compared with its professional translations in Romance (French, Spanish) and Germanic (English, German) languages; (2) retranslations from these languages to Italian, provided by L1 speakers of Italian and learners of Italian with French, Spanish and German as their L1 are compared with each other and with the original Italian text. Professional translations provide a window to crosslinguistic variation in the use of tense-aspect marking and to complex linguistic phenomena such as the aoristic drift in Romance languages. Retranslations from these languages back to Italian capture some differences in the way speakers develop a tempo-aspectual representation of situations. Similar analyses, guided by the teacher, can be conducted in multilingual classrooms as part of pedagogical translanguaging. Analysing the same text passage in multiple languages and engaging in its retranslations fosters crosslinguistic awareness and promotes joint exploration and co-construction of linguistic knowledge.