At present, the most commonly used approach in foreign language teaching is listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, translation, as an effective teaching tool, is often ignored. This phenomenon is mostly attributed to the prejudice of many scholars against traditional grammatical translation methods. As a traditional teaching method, teaching translation plays a positive role in promoting foreign language teaching. This paper analyzes the role of teaching translation in promoting language learning from the micro and macro aspects of foreign language learning and the role of mother tongue transfer. This paper holds that pedagogical translation is scientific and operable in promoting foreign language teaching and learning, no matter from the perspective of vocabulary and grammar learning, or from the cognitive basis of language acquisition.