L2 Journal: An electronic refereed journal for foreign and second language educators

Largely banished from language instruction following the adoption of communicative approaches, some researchers now encourage the use of translation as a valuable resource for the language classroom. While increasingly embraced in theory, there remains a need to better understand, through empirical research, the implementation of translation-based activities in language instruction (Carreres, 2014; Källkvist, 2013), as well as their impact. As this contribution argues, the implementation of translation presents unique challenges and opportunities for multilingual minority students who “operate between languages” (MLA, 2007, p. 237) in their daily lives but who are typically expected to behave monolingually in the classroom. This article contributes to empirical research on the implementation of a translation activity in one such setting. The data are drawn from a larger ethnographic project carried out in elementary and middle school classrooms in Perpignan, France. The focal classes were exclusively attended by Roma learners who self-identify as “Gitan” and as L1 speakers of Gitan, their local variety of Catalan. For the purposes of the present study, the analysis focuses on an activity that required Gitan learners in a middle school French language class to translate a Catalan comic into French. The case study was selected for its insights into some of the challenges and potential benefits of classroom translation for minority learners within but also beyond K-12 settings.