Dear Esteemed Colleagues:
I can say "Language is not a" in my honors class and the students will respond "word to word translation." This is one of my catch phrases this year, along with "staring is not studying" and "how you feel and where you are, always use the verb estar." I use them so often that I'm thinking of having posters made to hang in my room of what I dub as Cleggisms.
Language is not a word to word translation.
I began saying this two years ago when I collected journals from my students and found the rampant use of translators. It was frustrating and that's putting it mildly. I always start the year talking to the students about what cheating is and how translators are not acceptable. I talk to them about online dictionaries and have embraced wordreference.com as a mainly reliable online dictionary.
However given how trusting my students are of anything online, be it translators or online dictionaries, I started looking into Google Translator and how it works. I put together a twenty minute lesson on translators wherein I wrote a paragraph in English, put it through Google translator and then translated that back to English. We talked about how translators can sometimes give you an idea but they largely work on the idea that languages do translate word to word but languages don't. Languages require context and meaning, not simply a word for a word.
This year, as I was rewriting my first unit for my honors class I added a piece to this. Language is not a word to word translation; we express concepts. We have to ask ourselves: how does each language express the concept of age? How does each language express the concept of liking? How does our own language express these ideas and how are they different from the other languages we are using?
These are questions that come up frequently in class as kids are using online dictionaries more and more. I believe they are at a point where they know to use wordreference.com and not a translator but they haven't reached the point of realizing what they need to look up. They want to say "wanted" and look it up on word reference but they don't realize that English uses wanted as both a past tense of want and also as a participle as well as an adjective. In Spanish, these three grammatical uses of the concept of wanting are three different words based off the verb "to want" but in English they are the same word used in different grammatical contexts.
The ability to intuitively "get it" and be able to flip between languages and understand the nuances of use between them is complicated. Some language learners may take years to master this and some will simply "get it" just as some people innately get math and some struggle terribly. We do have a responsibility, to some degree, to help students be "correct" but our job as language teachers is different than a math teacher. In math, there is one correct answer, though there may be a few different ways of finding it. In languages, we have more flexibility. I can say "I to swim yesterday" and a native speaker would understand exactly what I was trying to express, even though I made a grammatical error.
Languages are difficult, abstract things. All languages share certain characteristics like subjects and verbs though they may express them in many different ways. Blanket rules do not exist, even in related languages. Spanish and French both were birthed from Latin and while a lot of grammatical structures are similar, there are many startling differences in tense usage and vocabulary.
Online resources, such as translators and dictionaries, allow the students an over confidence because of the very way they look. Enter one language here and I'll pop it out in the other language on the other side. Type in your Spanish word and I'll tell you the twenty-five things it could mean. Students struggle with reading those twenty-five meanings and choosing the right one. We have made the idea of context explicit to them. We give them a vocab list and tell them what it means in English, reaffirming the idea that language can be translated word to word . They don't realize how much thought we give our worksheets and practices to make sure they have the context to use those particular words correctly in those particular set of circumstances.
Not only do we have an obligation to teach our students vocabulary and grammar, but we also have a responsibility to teach them how to use these online resources. We must teach them how to ask the correction questions of these resources and how to wade through the information they provide. We must make these skills, that we as language experts have, explicit to them if we expect them to improve
I would like to invite all world language teachers to make the way in which we express language explicit in your classroom and to have these conversations with your students as their development allows. I further invite you to eradicate the word "translate" from your vocabulary and ask students to express the following sentences in Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin or whatever language you would like them to use.
It is a small change in terminology for us that will begin a major shift in how our learners think about languages.
Sincerely,
Shannon
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