Spanish as a mother tongue: what is the best equation for developing formal and functional aspects of linguistic competence in translation students?

Abstract

Translator training has traditionally been based on competences, where the linguistic competence in the work languages is declared as essential. The practical emphasis of this competence has been on the foreign language or languages and has not considered the mother tongue as a particular area of development. In the case of Spanish as a mother tongue, it has been evident for some time now that translation students have difficulties in the use of formal and functional aspects of the language when writing texts in formal contexts, which reveals difficulties in the acquisition of the linguistic competence in the mother tongue. The origin of this problem could be found mainly in two areas: communication, with the digitalization of communication practices, the use of social networks, the use of multimodal resources, among others, and education, with the decrease in the practice of writing, the lack of reading, and the low exposure to formal textual genres, mainly. In view of this situation, we seek to make a rigorous analysis of the emerging literature to address the problem based on specific cases identified in translation apprentices, with the aim of proposing methodological approaches for the training of translators whose mother tongue is Spanish. In an effort to find the best equation, the results of this first review have allowed us to address the microand macrocurricular aspects of mother tongue teaching for translators.