The ideal and the real in university teaching of translation

This paper reflects upon the expectations usually held by freshman students in an undergraduate translation course, revisited here through the postmodern perspective. The view most students share is that the teaching of translation may be systematized and learned through one sole and infallible method, a stance which echoes the traditional thought on translation as a transfer operation. The postmodern condition, on the other hand, conceives translation as an activity of production, and not reproduction, of meaning, whereby the translator is no longer seen as the one in charge of transporting intact meanings, but is granted the role of co-author responsible for rewriting a text.