Ecoliteracy in the translation classroom: notes and proposals

Abstract

Humanistic currents have gradually burst into social science studies, such as ecolinguistics or ecocriticism, advocating an interdisciplinary perspective that embraces environmental doctrine and cognitive language and integrating ecology into translatological science. Although studies on the relationship between language and the environment are not recent, they have not received sociolinguistic attention that highlights the ecological crisis we are witnessing. Currently, concepts such as eco-translation or eco-transliteration have appeared somewhat timidly in the linguistic-environmental field, giving a plausible visibility to the translator in the symbiotic relationship between society-economy-environment. However, the relationship between the translator and nature lacks exhaustive studies, and translator training is hampered by the lack of a solid academic background that integrates the transdiscipline of the environment. For all these reasons, in this article, we intend to take a look at the most important considerations about eco-literacy in order to subsequently apply it in the translation classroom through four activities related to business and the environment, environmental programmes and conferences, journalistic translation and technical translation, and voluntary cooperation.