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This chapter intends to integrate culture, pragmatics, and text typology in translation teaching and to raise awareness on their significance in the translation process among translation trainees. First, it offers an overview of contemporary translation theory on translation teaching from a culture-sensitive, pragmatic-functional, and text typological point of view. Then, it applies intercultural pragmatics to Greek/German translation of the special text type “obituary.” The findings of this analysis lead to the conclusion that intercultural pragmatics not only reveals translational obstacles and difficulties but also offers solutions for the amelioration of translational competence in general and in Greek/German translation of “obituaries” in particular. The chapter ends with the presentation of a short text type-specific contrastive typology for obituaries in Greek and German culture. By that, the author intends to demonstrate the significance of text prototypologies on the basis of intercultural pragmatics for the development of the translational competence of translation students and of its implementation in translation teaching.

This paper aims to instrumentalize cognitive grammar for translation didactics and to demonstrate its importance for translation trainees as a tool for fostering their cultural competence in and between their working cultures and, thus, for improving their overall translation competence. Methodologically, this will be realized as evidenced by the implementation of cognitive grammar on one particular Greek phraseological unit. In this context, the overarching theoretical point of reference for any translational purvey is functional translation theory. It will be shown that cognitive grammar constitutes a useful conceptual tool to assist and foster translation didactics in dealing with culture-specific elements of the translation trainees’ working languages.

This chapter intends to bring into beneficial interaction two language-based disciplines, i.e., foreign language acquisition (FLA) and translation studies (TS) and to demonstrate that the latter greatly benefits from the former. Concretely, by using FLA writing exercises in language courses for translation trainees (TT), it will be shown that the advantages from this implementation are not to be underestimated if these exercises are tailored to the needs of TT. Furthermore, these exercises not only improve the foreign language competence of the TT but also enhance other aspects of their overall translation competence. In order to tailor FLA exercises for translation trainees’ language courses, a specific methodological, didactical and conceptual basis is proposed which consists of an interactive implementation of constructivism, creativity theory, text linguistics and functional Skopos theory.

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