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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
IS TRANSLATION GOOD FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING?
Absolutely. It’s concentrating on the detail of the language. It’s making you think about the language, rather than simply studying grammar.
But what should you translate and which way? These are just my thoughts on the subject and may differ from what others think.
As a general rule, if you were an actual translator as your profession, you would most likely be translating into your own language, because that’s the one you’re more competent in. Therefore, I would suggest that is the way you should go with translation for language learning, translate into your own language. If you want to write in the target language, I would suggest you do that in your own words, create something from scratch, using the knowledge you’ve gained from translating. You could, perhaps, create a summary of what you’ve translated, or as we used to call it at school, a precis. Why did that word go out of fashion? Anyway, that would definitely help consolidate what you’ve learnt. But back to translating.
What should you translate? Honestly, it could be anything, from a passage in a book, to a newspaper article, to a song, to a blogpost, or something in between. The only thing it needs to be is something that you’re interested in, because if you’re not interested in it, you’ll get bored. Also, it’s good to learn vocabulary about things you’re interested in, so you can potentially talk about them in the future. And before someone thinks, I’ll get an AI to give me something to translate - don’t do that, unless you’re just asking for links to articles. You want natural speak, not AI speak.
When you first start out, don’t go too big. Select a few paragraphs, say about a couple of hundred words. If you do it properly, that will take more than enough time and concentration to exhaust your brain.
So, you’ve selected your piece. What next? My preference would be to translate as much as you can without looking anything up first. Yes, what you put down might be very rough and have lots of gaps, or question marks, but force yourself to try and get as much meaning out of it as possible, using what you’ve already learnt and any cognates in the passage. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you get something wrong. In fact, it might be better if you do, because correcting what you got wrong will have more impact in helping you to remember vocabulary and structures.
Right, you have your rough draft. Next, you can start looking up individual words, checking what you’ve put down and filling in the gaps. I think a dictionary alone (I don’t mean a paper one, unless that’s your thing) is good enough for this stage. Just go through the passage methodically, rewriting sentences if you need to until you get to the end. Just get the true sense of it down. This is unlikely to sound like natural language by the time you’ve finished, but we’re a long way off completing the translation at this point.
Then, read it through a few times and see if anything jumps out at you that might sound better phrased differently. Just because the word order in your target language is different, doesn’t mean you can’t change things around. This is the art of translation, getting things to sound natural in your language. This act will help you to notice the differences in structures and how you might be able to use them in the future.
Even after this, though, it’s probably still not completely natural. This is when I would start looking more closely at whole phrases. If something still sounds like complete gobbledygook, and you simply cannot make sense of it, go onto a site like Reverso Context and put larger chunks of text in, complete phrases, but not complete sentences, and see what comes up. If you put in complete sentences, you may not get very good results. Little snippets are better. Doing this, you might find some colloquialisms have been included that have a totally different meaning, or that a verb in this particular context has a completely different meaning. Keep doing this until you think you have a reasonably good translation. Then, put it away for a day or two, before going back to it.
Fresh eyes might notice different things, and you might have learnt something else relevant in the meantime. Make any changes you think appropriate. Do this a number of times, if you want, gradually refining and refining, but don’t dwell on one translation forever. Find something else to translate and begin again. Over time, you’ll get better and better at this and the more you do, the more you’ll learn and the fewer passes you’ll have to do for each piece.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.