Laura Gasca Jiménez, University of Houston
The relation between language teaching and translation is a difficult one. Nevertheless, translation has gained increasing popularity as a pedagogical tool in the last decades. Following this line of research, the present study aims to be a first step towards the integration of the translation activity in heritage language teaching. It focuses on pointing out the habits, attitudes and previous knowledge that students of Spanish as a heritage language have in the United States. The analysis was conducted with a sample of 59 university students of Spanish as a heritage language who were enrolled in an advanced intermediate course at the University of Houston. The participants filled in a questionnaire on their linguistic background, another one on their translation habits and attitudes and finally they completed an English to Spanish translation exercise. Results indicated that most of the heritage language students translate from English to Spanish on a regular basis. The most outstanding contexts of translation are the familiar, personal, academic and the work-related. Their attitudes towards translation are very positive and most of them stress its instrumental value in the United States. Furthermore, the analysis of their translations shows that most of them are able to convey most messages of a source text through the use of different translation techniques with different accuracy levels.