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Interlinear method | ||
Tags: Translation | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6258 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 1 of 14 16 June 2010 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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http://web.mac.com/davidcheshier/iWeb/Humanities%20Blog/Amat eur%20Humanist/5EB94947-27A1-478A-8C3B-C3108CB5991D.html
Interesting article about language-learning method associated with James Hamilton (died 1831). Note: I have tried but failed to remove the gap in the long URL. Edited by William Camden on 17 June 2010 at 1:35pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6135 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 2 of 14 16 June 2010 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting article. The use of long texts and parallel/interlinear translations is of course the basis of the L-R technique. It seems to have been more popular in Eastern Europe. Apart from atamagaii (Polish), it is also used by Ilya Frank www.franklang.ru, mostly between Russian and other languages, but also some material for learning Russian and Japanese via English. His argument is the same as in that article, that the exposure of language learning students these days is totally inadequate in quantity and they should dive into the language as rapidly as possible.
There is also a very interesting site www.arabic.ru (Russian only) which gives a documented justification for the use of literature to learn languages. This appears to have been a major method used before the development of public schools in Russia and he quotes some spectacular successes. They would read whole novels with a translation and the use of a teacher only to explain difficulties and ensure good pronunciation. The use of live-in foreign tutors and governesses also helped of course, though the author does not mention that - he is trying to promote his use of Chekhov to learn Arabic! I found some old Hugo textbooks in the Glasgow University Library which used the interlinear technique, so it did not completely die out after Hamilton. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5997 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 14 16 June 2010 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | ||
The author mentions anecdotal evidence that the students are better at reading and even at reciting, but there is no mention of productive skills -- I really cannot believe that a heavy focus on reading will produce any genuine fluency in speech.
And now we're right off track. "Classic texts" are riddled with archaisms and lacking in natural language. Just look at a 100 year old book in your own language and you'll see that even something that recent is quite far removed from your way of speaking. The article author is an extremist. He opposes the study of grammar because it doesn't teach vocabulary. Can't you do both? He opposes the teaching of theory because it doesn't provide opportunities for practice. Can't you do both? What you get out of a course is what's there. What you don't get out of a course is what's not there. You address that lack by adding in what's missing, not by taking out what's already there. I am sick of these false dichotomies. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6258 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 4 of 14 17 June 2010 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interlinear translations seem to be a popular presentation for religious books or software, where there is an intense preoccupation with the text. I think interlinear translation can be useful for deep reading, or for close study of the foreign language's structure.
If I have trouble understanding a passage in a foreign language, I sometimes write it out on every second line of lined paper, and then write in the literal meaning in English of every word above the L2 on the intervening line, usually in red ink. In this way I usually get to the bottom of what the passage means. (Additional note) The link I gave in my original post has an interesting illustration. It is the introduction to one of the Gospels (Matthew?) in Arabic and Latin. It has no connection with Hamilton but was from a New Testament interlinear translation issued by the Catholic Church in the late 16th century and republished in subsequent centuries. It appears to have been intended for missionary work with Arabic-speaking Muslims. Edited by William Camden on 17 June 2010 at 1:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6689 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 5 of 14 18 June 2010 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have used interlinears text for instance to study Dutch, Icelandic, Russian and a couple of other languages, and I made them myself using the method I have outlined in my Guide to Language Learning, part 2 message 4.
The texts were mostly H.C. Andersen's tales, which exist in many languages. And it functioned well, - the translations from Danish were sufficiently literal to make it possible to find the relevant parallel passages, even in languags which I didn't know yet. 'Free' translations are by principle bad translations (the freeer, the badder) if you have the slightest interest in the language of the original. But since then I have largely switched to another method, namely making 'interspersed' (rather than interlinear) translations of texts in my target language with Google translate and copying the translation 'as text' to Word. Then each sentence in the target language is followed by its translation into Danish (or English), and my main task afterwards is to color the Danish sentences and print the whole thing. This is however a far less labor intensive process than doing interlinear texts using Excel and Word. My main reason for preferring this method is however not the amount of work involved, but the fact that I can use non fictional texts - mostly about history or natural sciences. The downside is of course that these translations are filled with errors, but this is not as bad as it sounds as the errors occur in the version in your base language - that's why you have to use the method with texts in your target language, not the other way round. Besides most of Google's errors are quite obvious, so you can spot them and check your dictionary or grammar. The liberties taken by human translators doing more or less 'free' translations are much more harmful because they are more difficult to spot. I recently borrowed a version of "Satyricon" in Latin and Italian at the library, but stopped using the Italian version because it simply wasn't close enough to the original. I spent more time figuring out what each passage in the Italian version was suppose to refer to in the Latin text than I did on understanding the original text with the help of a dictionary. In such a case even Google is better - much better! Edited by Iversen on 18 June 2010 at 1:33pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6258 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 6 of 14 27 June 2010 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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http://classicsblogging.wordpress.com/2009 /01/28/interlinear -translation/
Use of interlinear in an American publication of Horace, dated 1894. It was probably influenced by Hamilton. There is discussion in the blog where it is found of whether or not interlinear is a good idea. Edited by William Camden on 27 June 2010 at 3:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5306 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 7 of 14 28 June 2010 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Actually, there's an easier way. I created a quick and dirty Windows Visual Basic script that converts a Unicode plain text file to an html file with interlinear text. For the translation I used Google Translate and for the html output I used a template designed by James Tauber. For more information on the formatting see Tauber's web site: Dynamic Interlinears with Javascript and CSS. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5972 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 8 of 14 03 July 2010 at 3:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Care to share that VB script, Doitsujin?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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