Translation as a teaching method?

[Rodica]

I am a teacher of English in Constanta, Romania. I teach high-school students (aged 14 to 19) and am currently trying to write my thesis on "Vocabulary teaching". One of the issues I want to address is that of using translation as a teaching method (not overuse it, though). Most of the textbooks on the market are based on the communicative approach, since they were designed to fit schools in almost any corner of the world. Translation is usually neglected and a large number of specialists reject it as 'dangerous' because, they say, there are no perfect/exact equivalents between languages (so why bother using L1 in the classroom?).
What are your views on using translation as a teaching method designed to enrich one's vocabulary?

[Torsten]

Hi Rodica,

Thanks a lot for your interesting question. I think that translation as a teaching method might have its advantages as long you use it with elementary students or people who have never been exposed to an English speaking environment. Once your students have achieved a certain level of proficiency it's probably better to stick to English rather than switching between languages. Also, the translation method is always limited to a group of learners who share the same native language. Since more and more companies require their employees to be able to work with professionals who have different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, you as a teacher should try to enable your students to communicate in English as much as possible.

Let me know what you think.
Torsten
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Jamie (K)]

Hey! I was in Constanța for a few days during the final years of Mr. Ceausescu! It wasn't a happy time in history, but what a BEAUTIFUL place to live! I envy you!

Anyway, down to English teaching:

The communicative method has its own problems that become evident as the students reach the high intermediate level. With its emphasis on communication over accuracy, it gives students plenty of time to fossilize linguistic errors that would have been eradicated before the advanced level in other methods. Students who have been educated purely through the communicative method are still writing things like "these bigs dogs" even at the advanced level, and by that time it's harder to get them to stop. Due to the poor accuracy students achieve, it's just as easy to say that the communicative method is "dangerous". Most students don't want just to communicate, but to communicate well, and communicative language teaching encourages them to engage in more inaccurate translation than well-managed translation activities do.

Translation is a good element to language teaching specifically BECAUSE there are not always perfect or exact equivalents between languages. While translating, students are forced to notice differences in structure and vocabulary, and they have to develop methods and strategies for dealing with them. Translation is much more efficient at this than the communicative method, which offers students many opportunities to AVOID developing such methods and strategies.

There are two elements to sounding good in a foreign language. One is knowing how to say a lot of things, and the other is avoiding things you don't know how to say. When communicating, people engage in both of these. Well-chosen translation assignments not only increase the number of things a person can say, but they set up situations in which a person can't avoid saying various things, and he has to find or develop a way to say them.

I am frequently given engineers, finance experts and other people who speak very articulate English, and whose command of the language is far beyond any advanced textbook. However, their English is far from perfect, and they want to develop it more. Reading articles and talking don't help, because they understand nearly everything they see, and when speaking, they are very good at avoiding situations in which they'll need idioms or structures that they don't know. This is where translation comes in. I pull articles in their native language off the Internet, and I make them translate into English. This makes even the most advanced people sweat, because they suddenly need structures, idioms and collocations that are not in their normal repertoire, and there is often no strategy available to avoid using them. In this way, guided translation into English helps their English a lot.

After one student moved back to her own country, she e-mailed me and thanked me for all the translation practice. She said it had really helped her in a number of ways, but one of them was that it taught her to change the style of writing when she changed languages. Once you go east of France, writing styles tend to be very verbose, with long, snaky sentences and very puffed-up vocabulary. In Germany and countries farther east, people tend to write this way even in a business setting, where efficiency and clarity of communication are supposed to be desirable. Non-native speakers often make the mistake of transferring this verbose style into their English business communications, and it can have very negative results. In the US, a business letter or document written that way might even be thrown away without being read. This student told me that this translation practice with me helped her by teaching her how to break up her long sentences and use simpler, clearer expressions in English. It specifically made her conscious of differences in communication styles in a way that the communicative method usually doesn't.

When experts in ESL teaching claim that some method or other is "dangerous", be very skeptical. ESL pedagogy is dominated by monolingual English speakers who don't know how to leverage the students' native languages to improve their learning.

[Alan]

Hi Rodica,

I agree that translation is a good, rigorous intellectual exercise and plays an important part in teaching a language. To quote from 'Fawlty Towers' without stating the 'bleeding obvious', it has to be assumed that the group you are teaching have the same native language and that the teacher is also well versed in that language, too. Some years ago I taught at two summer schools held at Exeter University taking a group of German students both in general English classes and in translation from German into English. In that situation I was able to see the students in both sessions. In the English classes I was, as it were, the 'guru' and knew best but in the translation classes we were all on an equal footing. Both our languages were at work, openly. And that concentrated the mind. I was no longer the 'guru', I was the facilitator as we were able to have a level discussion concerning the equivalent meanings within the two languages. The other advantage was that in the general English classes we could relate what was being taught back to the translation sessions.

Alan
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English as a Second Language
You can read my ESL story Too Many Words

[Yankee]

I agree that translation has its place in an ESL classroom.

In addition to what Alan and Jamie have mentioned, one thing I always noticed was that translation exercises were very useful for helping learners to avoid making mistakes with so-called "false friends" -- i.e. words that appear similar in the two languages, but which have different meanings.

In my business English classes (in Germany), I often had my students send me lots of samples of typical e-mails that they received or wrote at work -- both in English and German. I went through them and compiled lists of frequently used sentences and phrases. I also added what I thought were especially "interesting" or tough ones. We then used my lists in a variety of ways, many of which would have to be seen as translation. The feedback I got from my students was that they found working with these sorts of lists very helpful.
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Amy
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ESL teacher, and native speaker of American English

[Rodica]

...and please, do keep them coming. That translation is or can be so versatile a tool in teaching I knew; I was, however, uncertain of the reactions that might appear knowing that it is not the most popular approach nor is it always deemed as suitable for the average classroom. (I know, long and irritatingly "technical" sentence; something I must work on )

The setting for this "experiment" is a state-owned school, students of the same age and native language, similar levels of development, somewhat mixed abilities in communication and expressivity. I still have to work on logistics: what dictionary to choose (number of words, complexity, price, availability...) Probably the next best question is: What is it that I want to translate? Literary works/fragments? Articles? Real language or readers? Choosing the text may prove more difficult than designing the translation activity/lesson plan.

Another thing I want to present to my students is using corpora and concordancers either as a means to discover how frequent a word chosen in their translation is or to simply discover patterns (completely aside from translation). Yankee referred to something similar and reminded me of something I wanted to do. I was considering building a corpus of common (and not so common) mistakes collected from written papers of my students. How useful do you think would such a corpus be from the teacher's / facilitator's point of view? Admittedly it would have to be someone speaking Romanian since most mistakes would be caused by the student comparing English structures to Romanian ones (something Jamie pointed out).

[Jamie (K)]

I'd say that the most helpful texts for such instruction are things that are in very straightforward language. Journalistic articles are the best, I find. Three or four paragraphs for each exercise are enough. As for dictionaries to use, I would recommend some standard Romanian-English-Romanian dictionary (research shows that dual-language dictionaries are not damaging, as pedagogical folklore claims) combined with any good corpus-based single-language learner's dictionary, such as a Longman, Newbury House, etc.

Note that there's another interesting thing that happens in translation exercises. Schemata vary from culture to culture, and even if the student knows every word in the text, his mind often doesn't have the right schema to process the story.

For example, people from the Middle East and East Asia have trouble translating or even understanding this text:

[Torsten]

[Jamie (K)]

[Lxguy]

That depends on our teaching purposes.In primary and middlel schools in China,people tend to use communicative teaching method and translation method is often criticized.
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Make new friends,but keep the old!

[Jamie (K)]