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Translating as a practice method | ||
Tags: Translation | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 19 17 August 2010 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
Still, learn the language, then learn to translate. As you say, it's only part of your goal so you don't want it getting in the way of everything else. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jjangpie Newbie United States Joined 5489 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Studies: Korean | Message 10 of 19 18 August 2010 at 1:11am | IP Logged | |||||
Ah, I see. Ok. Thanks for giving me your input, it helps a lot. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5758 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 19 18 August 2010 at 12:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I personally am aware of myself being a mere human, so when I read, even when I read with paying much attention I still end up being content with roughly getting the meaning of a text. Later on I often can explain the content in German or English, but not in the language I initially read that text in!
And at least for me, formal grammar study isn't that helpful. Even when I do read about a certain grammar item and do the exercises, I still am stumped when confronted with it for the first couple of times in an actual sentence. It's a bit like trying to learn to throw a ball from calculating the trajectory first; grammar comprehension and production is an inherently procedural task and learning it with your declarative knowledge asks from the student mental acrobatics that I personally don't have a lot of talent for. On the other hand, when I am confronted with the sentence first, and only then learn the explanations or rules for it things fall into place very easily and are linked to the context and meaning rather than exercises or the setting of my study place. I even suspect that the crutches I make myself to be able to recall declarative knowledge about grammar slow me down when I'm trying to learn to use it. So I find it highly irritating that some members here say you have to learn the language before translating, because for me translation is one of the tools I am using to learn the language. Then there's also the bit about divided attention - unless you have a very good teacher and/or material that's just right for your personal progress, you will end up knowing some words and grammatical features better than others, even though they are taught with the same prevalence. For me, even reviewing old material doesn't help much with that imbalance because I do remember the material itself, so I don't have evidence for me not yet having grasped a concept. In such a case translation can be used to test one's real knowledge, and review the items that need reviewing. Edited by Bao on 18 August 2010 at 1:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 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 12 of 19 18 August 2010 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have used hyperliteral translation L2 -> L1 as a tool to illustrate and grasp differences in sentence structure between different languages. Making a translation on paper can also be useful at a very early stage in language learning where you still have problems keeping a lot of new things in a sentence in mind - for instance a lot of new words or the cases of a number of nouns. However the relevant translation type in this case is a hyperliteral translation with comments - not an ordinary 'pretty' translation into L1. Actually you are not learning L1, so there is no need to produce pretty sentences in L1. And inversely, 'pretty' translations which aren't reasonably literal are of little value as a help to understand sentence structures and single words in a L2 text. They can only be relevant for those readers who don't care a bit about the original language. Still making such translations was a major part of the old "grammar-translation method"!
At a later stage you don't need make a complete translation in order to grasp a sentence as a whole (except maybe for certain extremely contrived sentences in Latin). And from that point onwards translation into your L1 is totally irrelevant until you have reached a level where you might contemplate to take up a job as translator or interpreter. And there your aim well be to produce exactly the kind of pretty texts in L1 which I warned against in the case the beginner, so you have to learn the tricks of the trade. Edited by Iversen on 18 August 2010 at 2:25pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 19 18 August 2010 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's not exactly what I said. My point was that Jjangpie's goal of being able to translate later shouldn't affect his choice of learning strategy -- the primary goal should be to learn the language. Learning with a specific goal in mind can cause you to neglect other parts of the language, which can result in building an incorrect mental model of the language and applying strategies that can't be applied in other circumstances. For example, someone who learns French to read and write can trap themselves into never learning to speak. Without realising it, they construct an English-derived phoneme map in order to be able to read (neuroscientists claim that all reading is interpreted as sound in the brain) asnd more importantly, they can get word order wrong. This latter problem is quite interesting, and I noticed myself doing it a couple of times when I was spending too much time on written work but not spoken. I was writing sentences in the right order and I understood sentences in the right order, but I was starting to process them in the wrong order. It was like my head had two concepts: temporal order and spacial order. So I would read the 1st word, then the 3rd word, then the 2nd word, for example. And if I had to write that sentence, I would write the 1st word, think of the 3rd word and then say "the next word is xxxx, which goes before yyyy" and then the whole thing would look correct, even though my thinking was wrong. I might not have noticed this if I hadn't let my brain follow it through to its logical conclusion. I started writing the 1st word, leaving a gap for the second, writing the 3rd and then going back to fill in the second. As far as my brain was concerned, it was easier to carry out this convoluted process and understand everything in an English word order than it was to learn the word order of the new language. In the end, I had to force myself to say everything out loud in order to impose a single order on the language, and refuse to let myself correct part of a sentence. If I made a mistake, I had to start again. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ibraheem Groupie United States Joined 5357 days ago 84 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Mandarin | Message 14 of 19 19 August 2010 at 4:50am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree. I have done literal translations of German example sentences into English and it was very good for practicing grammar and helping my reading skills. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| grunts67 Diglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5294 days ago 215 posts - 252 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 15 of 19 19 August 2010 at 5:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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I found this discussion rather interessting and one idea just pop in my head: Does the method Assimil, in the second wave, make use of L2-L1 (oral) translation or should we consider this a different approach?
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| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5810 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 16 of 19 20 April 2011 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just wanted to resurrect this thread to find out what other experiences people have
of using a translation method as a learning method. I ask this because I was using the Practice Makes Perfect series a few moments ago and it had a translation exercise where you had to translate this story. It was designed to practice the subjunctive and so it was about what one person wanted another person to do. It was L1-L2, a complete story and it had the translations in the back for checking/comparison. I found it very useful. When I was a lower level, I had problems of translating from L1-L2 when speaking and it played havoc with my accuracy but now at a higher level it seemed like a good way of testing what I know/what I don't know/finding the gaps in my knowledge (reading/writing). Does anyone else have any positive/negative experiences of using L1-L2 translating as a method? oh and in reply to the last post in this thread, I'd agree that it is very similar to the Assimil method. Edited by crafedog on 20 April 2011 at 7:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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