ABSTRACT
Well-intentioned initiatives to globalize and diversify college curricula have put many instructors in the position of teaching literary and other key cultural texts in translation. In the absence of pedagogical guidance, however, instructors are likely to treat the translation as if it were the original, obscuring if not mystifying the intellectual labor of translators and the distinct cultural work of translated texts. Translation literacy sensitizes students to the workings of natural languages, a sensitivity that can only contribute to their development as astute readers and effective writers. Verbal systems vary greatly across language families. Words are not only polysemous; like all linguistic forms, they have histories, and over the course of their lives in language, they acquire not only semantic connotations but also social connotations.
