Toward a pedagogy of ‘translation in situation’

Abstract This article presents the outlines of the method of translation (in this case of pragmatic texts from Finnish into French), developed at the Department of Translation Studies of the University of Turku since the early 80s. In this method, we deal with the “translation of texts in their real communicative situation.” This concept of translation is based on a theoretical foundation which describes the operation of translation as an activity demanding a range of competences from ‘analysis of translation situation’ and ‘description of translation product’ to ‘production of the target text’ through the stages of ‘resource planning’ and ‘research’ (particularly research of so‐called equivalent texts in the culture concerned and organisation of one's own “text library”), ‘utilization of the sources’ and ‘cooperation with the requester of the text.‘