Translation exercises in self-study

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sirgregory
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby sirgregory » Tue Mar 08, 2022 12:27 am

Translating into L1: I like to do this when I'm reading something that's too challenging for me to read fluently. Even those "easy readers" are challenging when you're at the beginner level. It can take your brain a while to be able to process the sentences easily even if you know a lot of the words. The first time through a section, I translate it in my head if I need to. Then when I reread it I try to work my way up to understanding it without translating.

Translating into L2: What I find useful about it is that 1) it forces you to retrieve the words from your brain, 2) it gives you practice with things like verb conjugations and grammatical agreement in general. The key is to write out your translation with a blank sheet of paper without cheating. Or translate orally when you are a bit more advanced.

The most obvious drawback is that many translations are possible and if you've deviated from the answer key unless you have a tutor you can't be completely sure whether your variation is correct. This is an annoying but manageable problem. Usually the book introduces the vocabulary it expects you to use and usually the sentences are contrived to have straightforward translations (often with a hint for tricky word order). "I see the black cat." "My neighbor's niece is wearing a red coat." People like to mock such sentences, but they are designed to teach you basic vocabulary and grammatical structures and they do this effectively. The other drawback is that because you're working in L1 and L2, this makes it hard to "get in the groove" with the L2. This is certainly true, but you can do other L2-only activities for that. The question really is whether there's some benefit to working exclusively in L2 and I think it probably just introduces some unnecessary difficulties.

There are exercises that don't rely on translation and these can be good in their own way, but the most straightforward, unambiguous prompt is usually just to give you a sentence in L1. Alternatively, you could use pictures. That works fine for single words like ball, dog, moon, etc. But it doesn't really work as well for more abstract concepts or for full sentences. You can also give an L2 sentence as the prompt and transform it in some way, e.g., change this from singular to plural, transform this into a question, negate the sentence. These sorts of pattern drills can be done all in L2 which is nice but what you're doing is manipulating structures. This helps you acquire basic grammatical patterns but usually you're given the words in the prompt so it's not as good for retrieval of vocabulary.

It is of course entirely possible to learn a language without doing any textbook exercises at all, but you have to get the practice in some way or another. If you have lots of very patient conversation partners that would probably work and you won't need any L1 prompts in that case since conversations have their own natural prompts. This is free-form exercise with no answer key (unless the person you're talking to corrects you or makes a weird face).
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Kraut » Tue Mar 08, 2022 1:04 am

Kraut wrote:This is what my bidirectional/reverse translations look like, partly very ungrammatical in German, because they serve to hammer the new connection mental image + written word into my memory. It's basically what Iversen describes above. I memorize the complete texts and collect them for revision.


There are two forms of oral translations that can be used to practice and repeat the texts you have translated:

- consecutive translations as shown here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyvrU6FYN7o

I record my German translation of a text, listen to it and try to translate it back into Spanish IN A LOUD VOICE , at the beginning with an eye on the Spanish text. I control the speed and length with a remote.

- simultaneous translation, this is for professionals going from L1 to L2 or polyglots like Skulteny who goes from L2 to L1:

What's your single most important language training exercise?

VS: Simultaneous interpretation back into my language. And if I can add one more, then I'd say listening to content that is one level above your comfort zone, especially content where a translation is available.

https://ai.glossika.com/blog/aged-30-he ... y-language


I haven't yet practised this form but I will try with some of Pablo's podcasts, he has the speed that I can grasp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds3rXBWeU2s
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby lingohot » Tue Mar 08, 2022 6:56 am

Kraut wrote:- simultaneous translation, this is for professionals going from L1 to L2 or polyglots like Skulteny who goes from L2 to L1:

What's your single most important language training exercise?

VS: Simultaneous interpretation back into my language. And if I can add one more, then I'd say listening to content that is one level above your comfort zone, especially content where a translation is available.

https://ai.glossika.com/blog/aged-30-he ... y-language



Interesting. But what does he mean by "my language"? His mother tongue or the language he's studying? Because later he says:

Simultaneous Interpretation: In this case, we refer not to the professional job skills, but rather an exercise you can do on your own. Specifically, translating everything you hear in a foreign language in your own language at the same time that you hear it. For example if I hear a Slovak say "Film bol úplne iný ako som očakával" I would interpret in my head immediately into English "The film was completely different from what I'd been expecting".


I thought his "own language" would be Slovak?
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Kraut » Tue Mar 08, 2022 10:46 am

lingohot wrote:
Kraut wrote:- simultaneous translation, this is for professionals going from L1 to L2 or polyglots like Skulteny who goes from L2 to L1:

What's your single most important language training exercise?

VS: Simultaneous interpretation back into my language. And if I can add one more, then I'd say listening to content that is one level above your comfort zone, especially content where a translation is available.

https://ai.glossika.com/blog/aged-30-he ... y-language



Interesting. But what does he mean by "my language"? His mother tongue or the language he's studying? Because later he says:

Simultaneous Interpretation: In this case, we refer not to the professional job skills, but rather an exercise you can do on your own. Specifically, translating everything you hear in a foreign language in your own language at the same time that you hear it. For example if I hear a Slovak say "Film bol úplne iný ako som očakával" I would interpret in my head immediately into English "The film was completely different from what I'd been expecting".


I thought his "own language" would be Slovak?


Seems like a contradiction, but I think you have to add "if I was an English speaker". It would go against his line of thinking in tip 4:

Tip 4:
Don't translate what you want to say. Ask a native speaker how he would say it in that exact situation. Learn how they say it. The choice of words may be different but the idea is the same. This applies to most languages.

----------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkImCF6qihU

Luca Lampariello

How to Create Your Own Bilingual Texts in Seconds

A B O U T T H I S V I D E O
In this video, I will share with you a simple and amazing way to create bilingual texts to expand your vocabulary and enjoy reading in your target language no matter your level.

--------

a Belgian doing a fast-speed explanation in French about bidirectional translation


Le Cameleon des Langues

La Méthode de Langues de Luca Lampariello

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Oh914Ag4cE


Dans cette vidéo, je continue ma série de vidéos décrivant les méthodologies d'apprentissage de polyglottes, en décrivant la méthode d'un polyglotte accompli, qui est également coach depuis 10 ans : Luca Lampariello. Sa méthode s'appelle la traduction bidirectionnelle, et je décris cette méthode ici.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Iversen » Wed Mar 09, 2022 8:00 pm

rdearman wrote:Doesn't Luca do something like:

  1. Translate from TL into NL
  2. Wait a couple of days
  3. Translate his translation (Step 1) back into the NL and see how close he is to the original?

Maybe I am wrong. Although this exercise would give you the advantage of having a correct NL sentence to use.


That's also how I have understood his retranslation technique. But after several days you have probably lost the mental 'echo' of the original text, so in those cases where I have done something similar I have done it with a much shorter interval (minutes rather than days) so that I still remembered the original version - where Luca has to reconstruct it and hope for the best. The yardstick should in both versions be that your retranslation is as close to to the original as possible, but what if it is different? Maybe your version is as good as the original one? If you can do the retranslation successfully with an interval of several days then you are probably already so advanced that you don't need to do translations at all.

By the way, simultaneous translation in your head from something you hear into your target language is an excellent way of learning to keep the momentum - and then it doesn't matter that the translation is full of errors. Just learn to hang on and you can soon think at the correct speed. Trying to be correct even in your internal secret thoughts teaches you to be slow.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby sfuqua » Thu Mar 10, 2022 4:45 am

Heck I've been doing two way translation of sentences for years, translating sentences on the fly. anki makes it easy if you've got a bilingual set of sentences from Assimil or some other source. I just make each not into a card that has an L2->L1 translation on one side and a L1->L2 on the other. I set the deck so that it buries related cards, so that I never get both sides of a note in the same day, so that there is more actual translation involved. Of course there is always an ambiguity when one translates from L1_>L2, so I try to also include a word for word translation to reduce the ambiguity.
Front
I wanna go
I | present | desire | go

Back
Ou te fia alu

You can also edit your anki deck so that the L1->L2 card is delayed for several days or even weeks, it you want to imitate the anki passive and active waves.
I realize that many of you are talking about longer and more complext sentence than I am talking about. :D
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Kraut » Tue Mar 22, 2022 6:12 pm

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xn8t3xq

The Future of Translation in Higher Education
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue brings together a set of papers which look to the future of translation in higher education. It is a direct
response to the flurry of publications which over the last two decades have highlighted and explored the value of translation
as a pedagogical tool in modern language learning. In a now oft-cited early example, Cook (2007, p. 396) decried the
marginality of translation in “mainstream applied linguistic and English language teaching theory” and called for a return
to translation both in the language classroom and as a “major topic for applied linguistic research”. This call echoes through
subsequent publications and now, at the start of the third decade of the millennium, there certainly is an ample body of
scholarship, theory, and methodology that centers on translation in the language classroom. The changes are so dramatic
and the signs so positive that some have gone so far as to speak of a “translation turn” in language teaching (Carreres,
Muñoz-Calvo, and Noriega-Sánchez, 2017b, p. 99, our translation). On the ground, however, things are not always so rosy
and we are still very far today from a situation in which translation is systematically used in language instruction, especially
in the Anglophone countries where translation was long overlooked. Rather than adding to the now numerous calls for
the use of translation in the language classroom, the papers in this special issue seek to move the debate forward by
exploring what we refer to as the implementation problem and the question of impact. The papers exploring the
implementation problem address the gap that can exist between scholarly literature where translation is now valorized and
classroom practice where it can often remain marginal. The papers exploring the question of impact, on the other hand,
draw attention to the wider effects that the (re-)introduction of translation into the language classroom will have in order
to reimagine translation right across higher education.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu Jun 30, 2022 3:11 am

Another thread I've been meaning to reply to for a while....

In the beginning stages of language learning, or just beyond once coming back to review a completed course for example, I'll translate the exercises in a course such as Hugo ____ in 3 Months in either direction or both, usually aloud. The dialogues I do something similar. Assimil courses are particularly good for this. Nowadays I see a LOT of value in translation exercises despite rarely doing them. I think they are good for recall too. Translating an entire course dialogue such as in the Assimil courses aids imo also in solidifying grammatical patterns, idioms, vocabulary. I need to do more of it! I have extra fun with courses that aren't in English (eg Assimil - Le norvégien translating bidirectionally Norwegian to French, then French to Norwegian), translating the dialogue, and both sets of exercises verbally and written. For the some courses, such as Assimil's Dutch offerings I translate NL-FR and EN, then EN and FR to NL. Good for the language learning brain! ;)
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