In today’s globalised world boundaries between disciplines become more porous and this is certainly true in the field of modern languages, where monolingualism and prescriptive principles have started to change in favour of bi-, multi-, or plurilingualism. The reasons for this increased interdisciplinarity are multifarious, though an important factor is a sociocultural reality that is characterised by greater international mobility, and can be felt linguistically in many educational contexts. The heterogeneous linguistic background of diverse populations has led to new needs and challenges in the foreign language classroom, with the mother tongue (L1) and foreign language (L2) occupying different positions to those they were accorded previously; this has been matched in foreign language (FL) studies with new perspectives being offered on bilingualism, multilingualism and plurilingualism. Thus the reintroduction of translation into the foreign language classroom has generated a considerable level of interest among teachers, scholars and practitioners in recent decades. Similarly, this change of focus is also the result of significant advances in the fields of translation studies mostly and FL pedagogy to a lesser extent, where translation is regarded as much more than a bilingual activity and is considered as an overall beneficial and increasingly accepted practice. This has an immediate effect on how the boundaries between languages are perceived and consequently on the status of translation in the FL classroom. The native speaker is no longer regarded as an omnipotent authority in the FL classroom. The implication of this is that the bilingual speaker is a plurilingual person, but that a FL learner’s