Translation competence and the aesthetic attitude

Teachers whose aspiration is for their students to achieve Translation Competence need an understanding of its nature and of ways to help students attain it. The notion is related to that of Natural Translation, which proposes a series of developmental stages of the interpreting ability of a bilingual infant/child. The theory claims that links established between sets of items in a bilingual’s languages as the languages are acquired are exploited during a pretranslation stage from which Natural Translation develops. This is not incompatible with recent understanding of the Universal Grammar hypothesis and recent findings in the neurolinguistics of bilingualism. However, the model cannot account for non-native bilinguals’ abilities to translate, nor for translation abilities developed during formal instruction. These abilities might be based on innate Interlingual Proficiency and Transfer Proficiency Potentials. I list a number of ways in which Toury has agued that these potentials may be encouraged and add a suggestion or two of my own.