Bidirectional Translation

[qeadz]

I'm starting to do something new in my language learning. Once a week I'm taking a piece of text and translating it into English. While previously I rarely sat down and translated texts, previous experiences have shown it really helps me notice sentence construction - and really think about the meaning.

So it struck me that perhaps translating back into Korean afterward might have some use. After searching with Google, I found that Luca Lamperiello is a proponent of using this (and watched a video/read an article by him on it). However after page 1 of search hits, I pretty much run into machine learning hits from there on.

But some of you may have done this. My questions are:

1) What am I aiming to get from specifically translating back to Korean which I might not get with other writing I do in Korean?

2) How do I assess my end result, given it will almost certainly differ from the original text (and in some cases may not actually be wrong)?

3) Is there a timing component to doing this? Would I be reading, translating and translating back all in the same sitting to get good effect? Would reading one one day, translating the next, and back the following day lose some of the magic?

[tastyonions]

2) How do I assess my end result, given it will almost certainly differ from the original text (and in some cases may not actually be wrong)?

Assuming it differs, there really isn't any way. If you're working on material that actually challenges you, then at least some of the time you will be unsure whether the end result is actually correct and natural-sounding. So you'll need a native speaker to check it if you want to be sure.

3) Is there a timing component to doing this? Would I be reading, translating and translating back all in the same sitting to get good effect? Would reading one one day, translating the next, and back the following day lose some of the magic?

Putting a number of days between translations so that your memory of the original text has faded is best. This removes the possibility that you will simply be relying on memory rather than actually translating.

[mcthulhu]

1. One benefit is that you would have a ready-made set of valid Korean sentences to test your own Korean sentences against. I applaud your modesty in saying that they "may not actually be wrong." That's definitely desirable... but differences are to be expected, and studying those differences is what could be valuable. Even if your sentences are technically correct and the differences are only in word choice, and not in grammatical constructions or syntax or word order, it would still be worth examining why a Korean author didn't make the same word choices you did - are there differences in connotation, register or degree of formality, usage frequency (common vs uncommon words), cultural approaches, etc.? Does your version sound unnatural?

There is of course also the issue of whether you can be confident that your translations into English were 100% accurate and did not leave anything out. It's surprisingly difficult to provide your own quality control and see your own blind spots (I say this from painful experience). Reverse translation is also a way to test whether you're been translating an incorrect English sentence, and you could see some surprises.

2. If you have a native speaker to check your reverse translations that would be great, but you could also try Googling specific constructions or idioms to verify whether your versions of them are actually used, and to see the comparative frequencies of yours and the original's. Of course if you do notice issues with verb conjugation or syntax or whatever that would even more valuable.

If you need to keep score, maybe just count the number and types of errors (if they are errors) - syntax problems would be more serious than conjugation/declension issues, which might be more serious than lexical errors, which would be more serious than misspellings... That sort of thing. I personally might be more inclined to be subjective about assessing translation quality.

3. Definitely leave some time in between. Otherwise, as tastyonions pointed out, it becomes more of a memory exercise. That is not a bad thing, and it would certainly help to fix those sentences in your mind, but I think you were looking for more than that. You're the only one who knows how good your verbal memory is; but the translation effort would probably lead you to remember those original sentences longer.

[DaveBee]

3) Is there a timing component to doing this? Would I be reading, translating and translating back all in the same sitting to get good effect? Would reading one one day, translating the next, and back the following day lose some of the magic?

I looked at an old 'learn by translation' method a while back. That specified 'at least an hour'. [p.13 of archive.org text]

[Iversen]

Putting a number of days between translations so that your memory of the original text has faded is best. This removes the possibility that you will simply be relying on memory rather than actually translating.

Funnily enough I prefer doing the retranslation right after the original translation (which in practice means that you do them as one process). And yes, I know that Luca L has a somewhat different approach, and I have already commented on this somewhere.

The point is that I want to 'usurp' the formulations of the original passage and make them part of my own repertoire. The purpose of the first translation (from target language to base language) is to make sure that you really understand the words and the structure of the foreign passage, and also to ensure that you haven't just read it through cursorily. This translation should be hyperliteral, i.e. as close as possible to the original - even if that means that you break the laws of the base language. I would even accept the insertion of words from other languages if they better represent the meaning of something from the original.

OK, after the translation you should be able to look at it and remember (!) the original formulation in the target language ... and then you just have to write it down. At best it should feel like you were writing something invented on the fly by yourself, not as a memory test.

This procedure actually mimicks the way I use wordlists. I have three columns: target, base, target, and I write no. 2 as soon as I am sure that I can remember 5-7 translations of words in column 1. Then I cover column 1 and reconstruct its content in column 3. And the whole thing will be done in one go, not several days later.

What happens afterwards is that I do a repetition, and that can be done in different ways, but when we are talking about whole texts it would be logical to do it by reconstructing the original text once again from the translation, maybe after having looked it through once. After all, the point is not to test your memory. The point is to make you mull for some time over certain formulations in the target language which you want to adopt. Straining your memory doesn't add to your learning. It is just a way of making you so uncomfortable that you can use the pain as a memory hook. Being flogged or eating porridge while you study would be just as efficient.

[mcthulhu]

For some reason this thread reminds me of the Borges story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote. Menard would have been trying to skip one or two steps in this process, though.

[reineke]

True untranslatability

Languages differ less in what they can express than in what they must

"I was thinking of this today when on the subway, I saw a young man whose shoulder bag bore six red buttons, with "I am loved" written in white, identical except that each was in a different language. They look like this. (I later learned that this is an old campaign that began with the Helzberg Diamond company.)
What struck me was that three of the buttons identified him as female: soy amada (Spanish), io sono amata (Italian) and sou amada (Portuguese). In each, the past participle of "to love" (amar/amare) must agree with the loved thing, and the -a is a feminine ending. The young chap should have had soy amado etc. The poor button-makers had to pick one or the other, and chose feminine.

The German forced no such choice: a man or a woman can say Ich bin geliebt, as the young commuter's pin did. And Russian doesn't require it either, but the translation is menya lyubyat, "they love me". And Russian (more than most languages) forces a bunch of other distinctions on English speakers. The average verb of motion requires you to express whether you're going by vehicle or foot, one-direction or multidirectionally, and in the past tense, makes you include an ending for your own gender. So "I went" would, in one Russian word (khodila, say), express "I [a female] went [by foot] [and I came back]." If you don't want to express all of that, tough luck. You have to. Jakobson himself was Russian. Perhaps his native language led him to the insight above; learning the English verb go might have had the Russian wondering "that's it? By what means? There and back, or what? We would never put up with this in Russian."

When most people tell you some very unusual word "can't be translated", they usually mean words like these "Relationship words that aren't translatable into English": shockingly specific single words in other languages like mamihlapinatapei, which is apparently Yagan for "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start." But of course mamihlapinatapei is translatable into English. It's "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start." Needing several words for one isn't the same as untranslatability.

What really can't be translated properly is "go" into Russian, or "loved" into Spanish, not because the English words are too specific but because they're too vague. Those languages force you to say much more, meaning the poor Helzberg Diamond people can't make a single button reading "I am loved" in Spanish for both men and women. The traditional idea of "can't be translated" has the facts exactly backwards. Who knew that the truly untranslatable words were those that say the least?"

https://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson ... -languages

[qeadz]

There is of course also the issue of whether you can be confident that your translations into English were 100% accurate and did not leave anything out. It's surprisingly difficult to provide your own quality control and see your own blind spots (I say this from painful experience). Reverse translation is also a way to test whether you're been translating an incorrect English sentence, and you could see some surprises.

Point taken. I can say with absolute assurance that my English translations can be lossy. This is because Korean has some nuances which I don't know how to word in English. We tend to express them (in my opinion) through stresses and other changes to how we utter the words - which mean they typically aren't written (although sometimes italicized text helps).

OK, after the translation you should be able to look at it and remember (!) the original formulation in the target language ... and then you just have to write it down. At best it should feel like you were writing something invented on the fly by yourself, not as a memory test.

What size chunks of text do you do at a time? I'm guessing that if your goal is memory of the original, then it would be smallish chunks of 100 words or so at a time.

You mention you do a repetition, but from your wording it sounds like you're not repeating the entire process. It sounds like you go from target --> known language once. Then known language --> target multiple times, each time looking to phrase it more like the original target lang text. Is this correct?

[Kraut]

I'm using this method my hardware being an old Sony Minidisk Recorder (JE 530) that allows to create up to 250 chunks of sentences. Editing audio is very easy with this Sony.
I choose an interesting and coherent text, translate/record one sentence into German (mother tongue) and add the original (if I have the Spanish audio, if not I record the Spanish myself reading the Spanish sentence).
Then I memorise by playing the first pair, the second etc, I often press the repeat function of the remote and do nothing just listen and memorise.
When I find that I possess the meanings, I give up translating and listen and memorise in the original only, first in smaller chunks then a whole passage.

I exercice physically up to an hour each day by climbing up and down the stairs in my house. While I am doing this, I am listening to the recordings.

[Kraut]

Lamparello now is offering a course based on his bidirectional translation method
https://www.linguacore.com/bidirectiona ... on-course/
https://www.linguacore.com/product/bidi ... iwpr6qbukb

The bidirectional translation approach is also at the core of the much advertised Birkenbihl method in Germany
https://www.birkenbihl-sprachen.com/pag ... rn-methode
https://www.birkenbihl-sprachen.com/pag ... basis-kurs
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0032/ ... 1383816770