Methodology for bilingual recommendation, Spanish-English, of literary texts in a high school language resource center

Abstract

Students in high school need to write bilingual academic texts for different purposes and communicative functions. It is common that they have not developed knowledge or skills required for this type of writing. For this reason, they request support in bilingual writing in academic texts, and also for personal communication in letters and in social networks. Bilingual writing is a source of controversy since the lack of interrelation between native and foreign languages is generally promoted, as well as the idea that translation harms or interferes language teaching. In contrast, Pegenaute1, Nord2 and Fredholm3 propose translation as a support for language learning. In bilingual recommendation, students carry out self-translation of their texts, with the possibility of rewriting them in both languages, in order to adjust writing through multiple resources.4 Popovič et al.,5–8 Jung9 contemplate self-translation as a topic of research, and they disagree with the idea that translation is an art only for experts.