From L2 communication awareness to L1 text production: assessing students’ acquisition of pragmatic competence in translating texts on the GMO debate

This paper investigates the ways in which argumentation is dealt with in English and Italian by comparing and contrasting a comparable/parallel corpus of texts on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Pragmatic discourse strategies are explored in a comparable corpus of GMO texts written by US students and in translations Italian students made as part of a virtual exchange or tele-collaboration project. The project involved students in a US university writing argumentative texts on GMOs and students at an Italian university translating them. Corpus data suggest that – faced with unfamiliar, culturally different arguments about GMOs in US texts – trainee translators had to address issues concerning pragmatics and had to use a cultural filter (House 2006) to produce translations that read like target language originals and met target language expectations.