The Role of Natural Translation in the Growth of the Bilingual Child

In Italy, the teaching of translation as a bilingual speakersʼ specific skill is typically not included in the curricula of Russian special schools. In these educational institutions, the development of language skills (especially listening, writing, and grammar accuracy) in heritage speakers is generally given precedence. The act of translation exerts a significant impact on the cognitive development of the child, particularly in the context of bilingualism. It assists the child in differentiating and developing two parallel linguistic and cultural systems, while also fostering a greater metalinguistic and cultural awareness. Normally, translation is a natural activity that is not accompanied by a specific awareness in heritage speakers. Furthermore, bilingualism is not a sufficient condition for guaranteeing a good translation competence if speakers are unable to distinguish between the linguistic domains in which they operate. A natural translator, lacking specific training, tends to translate the source text literally. Based on the translations produced by bilingual participants in the International Cultural Bridge (Kul’turnyj Most) competition, parallel corpora were constructed for the analysis of translation difficulties experienced by heritage speakers residing in Italy and the United States of America. These corpora were created in Russian-Italian and Russian-English, respectively. Regarding these parallel corpora, the various types of difficulties will be analyzed separately or comparatively for each pair of languages on the Sketch Engine platform, thereby providing some basic indications for a more targeted teaching of translation. The use of corpora can be an important teaching tool to improve heritage speakersʼ linguistic competence and translation awareness.