ABSTRACT
An important purpose to which translation has been put for many centuries and in many countries is pedagogic: translation has been proposed as a means for teaching and learning a foreign language. This seems a sensible idea, because it is natural for people facing a foreign language to relate it to a language they already know. The foreign language needs to be presented to learners not as something unrelated to their previous linguistic experience, but as something closely related to it and an additional resource in their nascent multilingual linguistic repertoire. This is in line with an important general pedagogic principle of building on what learners are already familiar with. This sensible view, however, has not met with universal approval. This chapter analyses the controversy and examines when, how and why the use of translation in foreign language teaching and learning has been viewed positively or negatively.
