Translating in the Teaching Foreign Languages: Wikipedia as a Didactic Tool?

Abstract

This article relates to the field of the didactics of foreign language teaching, and presents the results of a preliminary study carried out in order to determine the extent to which Wikipedia can be used as a didactic aid and learning tool in the translation lectures of foreign language teaching in the Master’s degree in Dutch at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland). In view of the free access to this online encyclopedia, on the one hand, and the richness of texts (in Polish and Dutch) with a cultural content on the other, we investigated to what extent Wikipedia translation can be successfully used as a tool in L2 translation classes. The increasing importance of technological tools (such as electronic dictionaries, terminological databases, and machine translation software) for translation and its use in language teaching, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fact that Polish graduates in Dutch philology often work as translators, were the starting point for this research, which was conducted as a preliminary phase (case study) of a more extensive study into the practical application of Wikipedia translation activities in language acquisition classes.