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Translation method/grammaticaltranslation | ||
Tags: Translation | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Thor1987 Groupie Canada Joined 4668 days ago 65 posts - 84 votes  Studies: German | Message 1 of 7 29 December 2011 at 12:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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So I've been working on this idea for learning grammar for a couple years now.
Basically you apply the grammatical rules of your target language to your first language. As a way of grasping foreign linguistic concepts in a way that is more natural than simply repeating verb drills etc. I.e. English lacks tones or cases, so when translating say from German, with a phrase like, "I am a good driver", you would say "I be a gooder drivah". Now this might seem like a strange concept, but that's exactly the point foreign grammar is foreign as well as the vocab. So it makes sense to break up the learning into parts. Now a lot of people would say what I'm trying to create is a con language, but I'm not trying to create a language, the goal is to create a learning technique that can be apply to many languages in order to better understand concepts that are seen as foreign. Anyhow this is a concept I've been thinking of for a while and it's really hard to explain what I mean but that's the best I can do at the moment cheers. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6637 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 7 29 December 2011 at 1:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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The thing you are describing is basically the same thing as hyperliteral translations - i.e. translations where you try to imitate the structures of the target language as closely as possible, in fact so closely that the resulting text in your base language isn't necessarily correct according to the rules of that language. But who cares? You are studying a new language, not your native one, and the structures of your own language are basically irrelevant for this task.
Translations are of course most relevant during the phase where you try to come to terms with a new and strange language with weird structures and lots of unknown words. Later on you may use them to point out special grammatical features, but you won't need them to keep everything together in your head. And they only become relevant again if you decide to become a translator or interpreter - but then it is the normal kind you have to produce, i.e. translations that keep the meaning intact, but betray all structures and individual words if necessary. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5315 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 7 29 December 2011 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Why not apply them directly to your L2? All you need is a few words you already know, and you can apply any new rule to those words.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how "I be a gooder drivah" will help you speak German. For one thing, the verb isn't "be" and is actually conjugated, and "a gooder drivah" doesn't exactly tell you much -- yes, Fahrer is masculine, but the gender has nothing to do with the English concept of driver, only with the word Fahrer itself. Of course, others can say all they want, if you believe this helps you, then all the better, but does it really help you? In my opinion, you'd be far better off practising "ich bin ein guter Fahrer", which would give you the right conjugation and would allow you to associate the word Fahrer with the masculine. Grammar is intrinsically linked to the words themselves, not to equivalent English concepts. I think you are adding an intermediate step that's only making it harder. Edited by Arekkusu on 29 December 2011 at 3:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6637 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 7 29 December 2011 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I see the idea behind translations in general from a slightly different angle. When you study a text in a new language you will probably try to formulate what it means through a translation, and the point of hyperliteral translations is to make sure that these translations make as little harm as possible while still helping you to formulate what it is you have understood.
And if they are delivered by somebody else (as in some small languagebooks and language guides) then their purpose is to point out exactly which role and meaning each element in a foreign sentence has. A traditional 'free' translation may give you the general meaning, but leave you without a clue to the structure of the original version and the meaning of individual words. Later on you should of course be able to read and listen without making those translations, and some may argue that you should avoid them from the beginning. But this will only be possible in a setting where you learn from very strictly graded texts where you never have the feeling that you have bitten off more than you could chew - and for those of us who prefer genuine texts to graded textbook stuff this situation is part of the game. With time you can drop the translations except when you meet an unknown word or expression. Then a translation is still the most efficient way of communicating what it means - that's why we have dictionaries. PS: Even a hyperliteral translation shouldn't contain superfluous or misleading information. In "I be a gooder drivah" "I be" is misleading, while the simple translation "I am" actually contains the same indicators as "ich bin" .... so there is no reason to (mis)use "I be" here. And "driver is built on "(to) drive" in more or less the same way as "Fahrer" is built on "fahren", so there is no need to spell it in an anormal way. The "-er" on "gooder" is more problematic. I do see the point of using "-er" instead of the long annotation masculine singularis nominative, 'strong' adjectival flexion. The problem is that most of the endings of articles, adjectives and substantives in German are used for several cases and numbers, so it would be better just to indicate the things you really might be unsure of, for instance by marking the gender with a graphical sign and leaving the rest to your studies of the morphology of German adjectives. And that is not as difficult as it sounds. To put it simply, German has three paradigms for adjectives: the simple 'weak' paradigm after definite articles and a slightly more complex paradigm after indefinite articles and finally the 'strong' paradigm without articles. Learn the first two of those paradigms by memorizing just 5 places in each table where the ending isn't "-en", and learn the strong paradigm by noticing those 2 places where it doesn't correspond with the endings of the articles - then you'll never be tempted to write a concrete ending again in a hyperliteral translation. Edited by Iversen on 31 December 2011 at 5:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4799 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 7 29 December 2011 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
If you're going to do what they call "hyperliteral translation" here, which is what linguists call "interlinear gloss" then why not follow the actual rules of interlinear glossing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss --gary 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6637 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 7 29 December 2011 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Because a hyperliteral translation doesn't have to be interlinear, and an interlinear gloss doesn't have to be a hyperliteral translation - actually it can just as well be a sequence of annotations (which is closer to the meaning of 'gloss').
Both activities can be worthwhile, and there may be a certain overlap. For instance it can be necessary to make a note explaining the meaning of an idiomatic expression in a translation, and an annotation can contain a hyperliteral translation of an expression. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thor1987 Groupie Canada Joined 4668 days ago 65 posts - 84 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 7 30 December 2011 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the info, not that I completely understood it :D.
Anyhow my example for German wasn't supposed to be correct, just simply wanted to show a piece of text that was obviously modified English to people that don't automatically know a thing about German. Secondly German for me is no longer hard to grasp so I wouldn't use this technique for German. I'm getting interested in learning mandarin, and I feel it'd be useful to get the sense of tones in English, before I try learning a vocab that is stranger than baby talk. My fear and there is research to back it up, is that if I don't grasp the concepts of tones before I start learning the language I could risk mixing it up endlessly. An example is die das der in German. This concept is very foreign to English monoglots. Noun genders is a stranger concept, and learning strange words like baum have genders dosen't really help me grasp the concept. Now if you told me to use arbitrary genders, and apply them to English I might have a shot of understanding it. So we have thee car, tha tree, thas appel. than from there I could start applying regular rules of noun declination. And have thee car, with them apfel is going to then tree. Doing this exercise in my first experience allows me to understand a foreign grammatical concept in a language I know well. Meaning I am able to grasp a concept much faster than I would if the grammar was placed in a completely foreign enviroment(the l2). Now if grammar to you is a breeze, this isn't even a concern, but for me I grew up speaking a dialect of English, where grammar for the most part is open ended atleast relative to most canadians, linguistic rules are just strange. For so much of our history, the rule was"dis is how you talks, and dat is how I talks" With no reference to right or wrong. Anyhow in closing for me this technique has helped me turn from a grammatical idiot to someone that finds a concept like the the the the just strange :D. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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