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Is translation bad? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 28 05 November 2010 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | ||
OK, but how do you evoke the meaning of the word? One example is not the meaning -- the meaning is a nebulous thing. Using a native-language word isn't "translation", it's quite simply the only way to access the full concept rather than just a few exemplars. To build up a whole new concept by generalisation from exemplars would take forever, but even in the target-language-only environment, language learning doesn't take forever, so they are clearly re-using the concept from the native language. If they are reusing the concept that is labelled with a particular word, then it makes sense to use that label to evoke the concept, rather than presenting examples until they realise what concept they're dealing with, because as soon as they have the concept, they'll be thinking of the word anyway. And as a said, a picture of a car is not the whole meaning of the concept of a motorised 4-wheel passenger vehicle. It is either an example, or it is a hieroglyph or pictogram of the word "car". 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5660 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 10 of 28 05 November 2010 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | ||
Absolutely right. I have an example of exactly this from today. I was talking with a woman about a disagreement within her family, and she used a word I wasn't familiar with - and I told her so. So, we she tried to explain it another way, and as I was following along I found my brain reverting to English at several points for a second or two asking myself "acceptance?", "agreement?" and (eventually) "reconciliation?" which turned out to be the correct meaning. As soon as I realised that she was talking about reconciliation (as a concept) I could elaborate vastly on what she was talking about from already knowing many things about what reconciliation means. This also fired off thoughts about lots of other related areas, all very quickly. So, translating the word didn't limit my understanding of what she was talking about, but rather enriched it dramatically. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5757 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 28 05 November 2010 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Balance is good.
What, I think, is proven is that the majority of students will not reach a good level of proficency and therefore won't be able to actually use the language when they exclusively learn via grammar-translation instruction. This does not mean that translation exercises are bad or useless per se. Translation exercises are one possibility to work thoroughly with text; they steer the focus to words, forms and sentence patterns that the learner didn't master yet. That pretty much defines their scope of usefulness: Testing and review of material that has been studied, but hasn't sunken in yet. There other application I can think of is to make text that is noticeably above the current level of a student approachable. I personally gain from that practice, but many others might find it ineffective or too difficult. The usage of monolingual dictionaries may help the student to develop a more native-like structure of the mental lexicon of their second language. It also may encourage the student to develop and use context/key word skills to deduce the meaning of a word or, more importantly, to remember half-forgotten words. I would not want to replace bilingual dictionaries with monolingual ones or vice versa, but rather use both of them. (And native speakers' explanations and the internet and encyclopedias and whatever source of words' meanings are out there.) Arekkusu, I personally do enjoy to read about your experiences but you might want to remember that you seem to be an exceptional individual with high language aptitude, be it natural or acquired. Many of the skills you use may be unknown to the average language learner. Oh, and by the way: I translate all the time. To be precise, there's a stream of thought at the back of my consciousness that tries to express anything I hear, read or think in whatever language it finds first, sometimes more than one at a time. When I suddenly start to chuckle it usually is because the results were odd ... Edited by Bao on 05 November 2010 at 4:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5372 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 12 of 28 05 November 2010 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think anyone is actually advocating that all new words be acquired with complete abstraction of any other language. If a word in another language equals perfectly or nearly perfectly a word you already know in any language, then by all means use that word to immediately access the meaning or concept, but any translation past that initial contact (or until you've learned the word) will be a huge obstacle to fluency. Does anyone disagree with that idea?
If I've lead on that I never refer to other languages when learning new words, then I must apologize. However, one can never reach fluency if a direct association between the word in the foreign language and its meaning is not made early on, if not right away. The way I see it, the concept of apple exists in your mind, without the need to invoke any word to represent it. As you learn other languages, you learn to express that concept through different media or filters, be it apple, pomme, ringo, Apfel, etc. Thoughts are filtered through words. Add translation to the process and you've made this an extremely complex task, but if another word gives you immediate access to the basic concept, then all the better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| CaucusWolf Senior Member United States Joined 5263 days ago 191 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Written), Japanese | Message 13 of 28 05 November 2010 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||
I do this sometimes when reading. When that part of your brain is switched on it's very difficult to switch it off. It starts usually when I'm reading a book that either reminds me of anything Arabic or is about Arab culture. This makes me wonder what its like for a polyglot who gets stuck in this conundrum. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kthorg Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5218 days ago 50 posts - 62 votes Speaks: English*, Norwegian*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 14 of 28 05 November 2010 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think the idea of avoiding translation is to get you to be more organic in the foreign language. For example if I say to someone to which I am teaching Norwegian, I'd just say "gresskar" means "pumpkin."
"gresskar" is then just a sound, one that others use for an object you call a pumpkin. "Pumpkin" is so ingrained that to just add another sound means nothing, there's no picture of a pumpkin that pops into your head, for lack of a better phrase, on just hearing "gresskar." To associate this takes a while of using the simple fact that you KNOW this means pumpkin, until eventually "gresskar" just... means pumpkin, it's a trigger to a concept you have in your head (not a concious formation of sound), just like the English word has been all your life. If you learn this word within Norwegian, it tends to (not always) stick faster, but it's not any diferent a result than that of translation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5217 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 28 07 November 2010 at 3:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Is translation bad? Certainly not, but you have to take it with a grain of salt. Let me elaborate.
In TEFL, as well as Spanish and German teaching as FL, idiocy abounds, that meaning that things are generally done or not just because some god of the current fad said so and not because they actually do or do not work. The particular problem with translations boils down to the fact that some (many?) students get stuck in their progress because they are not given a proper insight of the process by their teachers, which are often unaware of it themselves. So, since it's is easier to discard a tool than it is to refine it, translation is largely discarded because it doesn't work for some people and replaced with other methods which are 'more universal' (hah!) if certainly way less efficient (but that they'll never admit). To me it is obvious that translation (or any other tool) should not be dropped by those for whom it works, so let's analyze why it fails sometimes and what can be done about it... Many people don't realize that translation is slightly more complex than it seems, and Splog nailed it on the head: "Where is the harm in translating it to 'something like a sausage' as would a dictionary and then refining your understanding as you learn more?". This reflects a very important insight that many people are unaware of and that I think is what makes translation fail when it does. Languages are codings of the thoughts you want to express to other people. Speakers of the same language use nearly the same coding and for that reason mutual understanding is almost automatic. But no matter what, communication in any language (assuming that usually people try to communicate meaningfully and coherently) goes like 1) I think of something I'd like to say to others. 2) I transcode it from <however my brain handles it> to <English or whatever> and say it. 3) You hear it and decode it: i.e. you try to make some sense out of what you hear, the reverse of 1+2. 4) You think about what you understood and, optionally, the loop begins again swapping roles. And it is in the transcoding from words to thoughts again where all the magic happens (or quite often it doesn't ;) Why? For one, with a clearly limited set of words and a virtually unlimited set of things to talk about, all words are more or less bound to polysemy; that automatically means that everything you say is more or less ambiguous, no matter how clear and crisp your ideas might be. And many people just don't see this, because they do not examine speech with enough detail. Now, for a close approximation of the original meaning to be reconstructed, the more words you hear the better, because as their meanings add you start to discard the 'illogical' combinations of meaning out of all the possible ones. If you want I can elaborate with concrete examples but I hope this is clear. In the end, the whole process works remarkably well nearly all of the time. Except that we mishear, misunderstand, etc. often enough. Then, at the end of stage 2. people who are not aware of this almost necessary ambiguity of most words start translating nearly word by word* because they think each of them makes complete sense in isolation (which often is not true) instead of waiting until more words disambiguate the true meaning of what is being said. Since we all know that word translations between languages are rarely a one-to-one thing (just as true one-to-one correspondence between synonyms in the same language), the translated speech becomes broken and harder to understand, because the possible combinations of meaning are different from the original ones and go unpredicted (by the speaker) ways, which are not as easy to discard by the interlocutor. The results can be anywhere between perfect comprehension and a funny look and a blank stare. This is how translation usually fails. Once students are aware of it, they can be properly taught to think of most words as having a merely approximate meaning and to wait and keep checking until complete ideas are expressed before attempting translation. The whole 'translation problem' is entirely avoided if students use monolingual dictionaries, because they're forced to make things slowly sink in the right place, just as when they were kids. The bilingual dictionary method is way faster, with the drawback that things may end up in the wrong place in their heads. Proper understanding of the whole process lets you effectively escape the pitfalls of the faster method until you're advanced enough to switch to monolingual dictionaries without losing speed (which is often not the case of learners) and optimize vocabulary building/acquiring time. But of course all of this is anathema in the world of TEFL and the like. * Unless at a very early stage, every learner knows that 'coche verde' = 'green car' etcetera and that some words have to be swapped around, yet they have 'the translation problem'. So when I say 'words', you must read 'words or small clusters of words'. Edited by mrwarper on 07 November 2010 at 3:40am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5757 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 16 of 28 07 November 2010 at 4:50am | IP Logged | ||
I tend to agree with a lot of what you're saying*, but I have to say that I observed it often enough that my classmates looked up words in a monolingual dictionary and, as soon as they understood the meaning of the word, translated it to German. From my empirical experience it seems to be much more effective to make the students actively paraphrase newly learnt words than to tell them to work with monolingual dictionaries. *Though I have my reservations about the hypothesis of a Language of Thought and certainly would want to learnt a lot more about the way the mental lexicon is or may be structured before saying anything other than 'I think it's not as simple as a direct link between concept and word, with either the native language word working as go-between, or not.'{size] 1 person has voted this message useful |
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