The role of previous foreign language knowledge when translating from Italian as an unknown language into L2 English or L3 Spanish or French

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to examine and describe Swedish upper secondary students’ use of their background languages while translating a text from Italian, a language unknown to them, into either their L2 English or their L3 French or Spanish. The assumption here is that searching for similarities between these languages is a natural feature of language learning and that intercomprehension can lead to at least limited understanding of an unknown language. The written translations were analysed quantitatively by calculating translation accuracy in the different languages and qualitatively by means of a retrospective questionnaire on the translation process. A psychotypology questionnaire was also included to examine the participants’ perceptions of the similarities between the languages involved. The majority of the participants stated that they perceived Spanish to be more similar to Italian than any of the other languages involved in the study. Moreover, the results show that the students in the group that translated into Spanish translated the text more accurately than those who translated into French and English. The comments in the retrospective questionnaire show that the students reflected on similarities between the languages on a lexical level, but also on structural and phonological similarities. Contextual cues were also important for the participants’ inferences and translations.

Research on foreign language learning, teaching, and assessment in Sweden 2012–2021

“…Other Romance languages were not used to the same extent as English or Swedish, which points to the role of high proficiency for strategic use of other languages. Furthermore, Smidfelt (2018) and Smidfelt and van de Weijer (2019) investigated translation from Italian to Swedish, other Romance languages, or English. All known languages were to some extent activated and used for comprehension.…”

Case Study Research in Multilingual Contexts

“…But there was also a tendency to give priority to cognates in L1, which may suggest a special role for L1 in this type of task. This case study was a further elaboration of a similar, earlier study on group data (Smidfelt 2015) and was followed up by an additional group study (Smidfelt & van de Weijer 2019) in order to provide a larger number of participants, translation into prior L2s, and a psychotypology questionnaire.…”