Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

4.6.2 Textlinguistic translation methods

In their work, The Translator As Communicator (1997), Hatim and Mason address, from a textlinguistic angle, three important issues which are related to translation training; these are the nature of text-level errors, curriculum design based on a typology of texts and approaches to the issue of translator performance assessment. Of these three issues, their approach to curriculum design is by far the most important, given the purpose of the present book. The curriculum design proposed also constitutes a most innovative approach in that it deals with texts “in terms of an overall context-sensitive strategy”:
Approaching texts (as written or spoken records of verbal communication) in terms of an overall, context-sensitive strategy is, we believe, both durable and meaningful as a way of developing translation competence. (Hatim & Mason 1997: viii)
In this section, a review of Hatim and Mason’s major contribution to the issue of curriculum design will be undertaken first because their contribution provides a good illustration of the possible applications of textlinguistics to translation teaching and secondly because of the insights and useful guidelines it presents to translation trainers and trainees alike.

1.