Abstract

This paper reports on the introduction of translation activities into a regular English reading class for first-year Japanese undergraduates. The main purpose of these activities is to create an opportunity for students to engage in "deep thinking" including inferential reasoning in the process of understanding the given text. The students were divided into two groups: D1 and D2. Both groups translated the same children's story from English to Japanese. Group D1 produced the target text (TT) directly from the source text (ST), whereas Group D2 produced TT after drawing pictures of the given text. After completing the first version of translation, both groups were instructed to work on a second version, using a worksheet on which drawings from the original text are reproduced as translation cues. In the current study, the latter versions of translation were analyzed to see if there are any differences in inferential processes between the two groups. The results show that D2 students used a wider range of pragmatic processing, including free enrichment and derivation of implicated meanings in their TTs. This may suggest that by deliberately creating a non-linguistic stage in the translation process, we may be able to provide students with an opportunity to engage in inferential reasoning, which in turn will help them deepen their thinking.