Since 2013, the Language-in-Education Policy (LiEP) in South Africa mandates that all teaching and learning in the foundation phase of schooling be provided in the learners’ home languages. For most black learners, the home language happens to be one of the nine indigenous African languages that are constitutionally recognised as part of the official languages in the country. However, most teacher education programmes in higher education institutions (HEIs) are offered in English, which often results in teacher trainees being less prepared or incompetent to teach using the indigenous African languages. There is a need to enhance the use of these languages in teacher education programmes to help improve teacher trainees’ multilingual competence. In this conceptual paper, I intend to show how integrating translation as a pedagogical tool in teacher education language teaching programmes can help improve prospective teachers’ multilingual competence in preparation for teaching in multilingual classrooms. Since the concept of translation as a pedagogical tool seems to have not been researched in the South African context, I do a qualitative study which analyses existing studies that have been done in international contexts. Findings from the qualitative document analysis show that translation can help promote multilingualism, intercultural competence and improve language proficiency. These reported benefits can be valuable for teachers who are being trained to work in South African multilingual classrooms.

Keywords: Translation, multilingualism, pedagogy, teacher education, South Africa.