How Foreign-Language Teachers Can Improve Learning by Means of Naïve Translation Equivalents
Midhat Ridjanović, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Dr. Ridjanović is professor emeritus of English and linguistics at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. He has published several books and numerous articles on a variety of linguistic topics. Professor Ridjanović’s main interests are English and Bosnian grammar, English-Bosnian contrastive analysis, translation theory, and translation as a tool in language learning. E-mail: r.midhat@gmail.com
Menu
Abstract
Introduction
Grammar errors triggered by NTEs
Using NTEs to teach English
Conclusion
Notes
Research has shown that adult learners tend to produce words and other structural elements in an L2, either in speech or writing, by tacit translation of semantically corresponding words or elements in their L1. Also, many learners translate as if each word in their L1 had only one meaning or function in the L2.
In 1983, the author introduced the concept of Naïve Translation Equivalents, or NTEs, to explain this phenomenon. He proposed that if foreign-language instructors learned how to identify NTEs, they would know the source of many L2 errors. Having done this, they could then work to eliminate these errors through specifically designed lessons.
This article revisits NTEs and presents ways in which they can be used to improve FL learning, with examples from English. The author suggests that they can and should be used by teachers whose L1 is the same as their students’ — the situation of most foreign-language classes around the world.
In an article published in 1983 [1], I introduced the concept of Naïve Translation Equivalents (NTEs) and suggested that they could be useful tools in discovering and preventing many L2 errors. Both because of the nature of the journal in which it was to be published and because of my own still tentative ideas about the notion, I wrote the article in an offhand manner and sprinkled it with numerous colloquialisms. Still, it was well received and some readers sent me congratulatory letters, one of which was published in English Teaching Forum.
Since that time many of my colleagues in Bosnia and some in the United States have used the notion of NTEs in teaching English and in translation courses. They have all found them very useful and one colleague called them a revolutionary tool for improving the quality of translation and facilitating FL learning.
In an article entitled 'Naïve Translation Equvalent', published last year in the online Translation Journal [2], I explored possible uses of NTEs by translators as well as the value of the notion of NTE in translation theory.
The idea of NTEs was born out of my questions related to so-called "literal" translation. We all say that literal translation is bad. But why is it bad? One feature of literal translation is that it is generally a word-for-word translation. Although such translation may be acceptable in many cases (cf. That house is big = Cette maison est grande), in an overwhelming number of cases it is not. But what about other features of literal translation? I think that an important aspect of literal translation, perhaps more important than word-for-word translation, is the use of the most frequent foreign-language translation equivalent of a native-language word or structure in contexts in which that word or structure has a different translation equivalent. I have called incorrect words or structures in the target language, produced by such naïve and erroneous translation, Naïve Translation Equivalents (NTE).
Research has shown that adult learners tend to produce words and other structural elements in an L2, either in speech or writing, by tacit translation of semantically corresponding words or elements in their L1. Also, unless they are linguistically sophisticated, most people tend to translate native-language texts into another language as if each word in their language had only one meaning or function.
If a linguistically naïve English-speaking learner of French learns that the English jump is the French sauter and joy is joie, s/he is likely to express jump for joy in French as *sauter pour joie rather than the proper sauter de joie, because pour is by far the most frequent translation equivalent of for, because for simply “means” ‘pour’. By using pour, the most frequent French translation of for, in a context in which it cannot be used, the English-speaking learner of French (or translator into French) has made an error which I call NTE. At least half the errors made by my students at the English Department of the University of Sarajevo, where I taught for nearly four decades, were NTEs. Frequently occurring NTEs were mistranslations of the Bosnian [3] preposition za as the English for, because although za has about 20 translation equivalents in English (if we count phrases in which it is used), for is by far the most frequent one. A short time ago the International University of Sarajevo was preparing to launch my last book [4] and, talking to me on the phone, their secretary, a native speaker of Bosnian, said: *I know for your book, corresponding to the Bosnian Znam za vašu knjigu. Obviously, the error was caused by the use of the most frequent translation equivalent of za in a context in which it requires a different translation equivalent (in this case about). Another common error is the wrong use of for in phrases like *the road for Sarajevo instead of the proper the road to Sarajevo, caused by the use of the most frequent English translation equivalent of the Bosnian preposition za in a context in which za does not correspond to for. Wanting to say I will be back in five minutes, Bosnians often say I will be back for five minutes, because the required Bosnian preposition in this context is za. The English sentence is not ungrammatical but has a different meaning from the intended one. We might call this kind of error ‘double NTE error’.
NTEs can help us identify the source of certain grammar errors. One such error, which I have observed on several occasions, is the wrong use of adverbs in complements of predicate verbs denoting a human perception. Instead of saying
This smells nice
Bosnian learners of English will often say
*This smells nicely
because Bosnian perception verbs take adverbs in their complements, not adjectives, like English perception verbs (i.e. Bosnian perception verbs are not a type of linking verbs, as in English). What is interesting is that errors of this kind are made by Bosnians with hardly any conscious knowledge of the grammar of their language. We must conclude from this that tacit knowledge of the grammar of one's L1 is an important (tacit) factor in the process of learning a foreign language.
When speakers of a language are frequently exposed to an NTE, they may in time accept the particular "wrong" word or structure as normal and proper. This happened to the complement of the Bosnian Hvala ['Thank you']. Until about 30 years ago, the complement of this word was a prepositional phrase introduced by the preposition na, which most frequently translates as on in English. However, for the last three decades or so, young people, influenced by the use of for in the prepositional phrase functioning as a complement of Thank you, started using the most frequent Bosnian translation equivalent of for, i.e. za, in place of na. Thus, instead of the "classical" Hvala na (vašoj) pomoći ['Thank you for your help'], young people increasingly say Hvala za (vašu) pomoć, although the structure with za would have been unthinkable some 50 years ago.
Sometimes an error deriving from an NTE gradually becomes generally accepted, but only in the particular collocation(s) in which it was originally used. Bosnia-Herzegovina was occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire for 40 years (from 1878 to 1918) and many public institutions established by the Austrian authorities were given German names. They built a museum in Sarajevo and called it Landesmuseum; they also founded the National Bank, which they called Landesbank. Now the German noun Land has several common meanings ['land', 'country', 'state'] and some less common ones, including 'province, region' (Germany itself is made up of 16 Länder). The latter meaning is more commonly found in Austrian German than in Hochdeutsch (e.g. das Land Tirol). Nevertheless, Land is used most frequently in the sense of 'country, state'. This sense of Land corresponds to Bosnian zemlja ['country'] or država ['state']. The anonymous translator of Land into Bosnian decided to translate it as zemlja, thus using, as might be expected from a linguistically naïve person, the Bosnian NTE of Land. But in the two German compounds quoted above, Land is used attributively and, at that time, attributes in Bosnian had to have the form of adjectives (we now have many noun + noun compounds, no doubt under the influence of English and German). So the translator used the adjective zemaljski derived from the noun zemlja, and called the two institutions Zemaljski muzej and Zemaljska banka. In fact, the adjective zemaljski is hardly ever used as an independent word, appearing mostly in the compounds ovozemaljski ['of this world'] and vanzemaljski ['extraterrestrial']. Still, native speakers of Bosnian associated zemaljski with zemlja in the sense of 'country, state', although Bosnia-Herzegovina was not a country at the time but a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus, an NTE has changed the names of a number of institutions in Sarajevo, but nobody has ever objected to the change, probably because the names, through long use, have largely lost their descriptive character and are treated as proper names.
It is interesting that the adjective zemaljski was officially used once more to refer to Bosnia-Herzegovina as a country, but not as a direct translation equivalent. During World War II, in 1943, the representatives of different parts of Bosnia gathered in the town of Mrkonjić Grad to draw up a declaration about the future of Bosnia. The gathering was called Zemaljsko antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Bosne i Hercegovine ['The Zemaljski Anti-Fascist Council of People's Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina']. I deliberately left Zemaljski in the original because of its vague meaning suggesting that the country is a "land" aspiring to statehood in a future federal Yugoslavia.
Every language must have words which were originally NTEs of words of another language. I have a strong suspicion that the English neighbor in the Biblical commandment Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself is one such word. The Bosnian equivalent of this commandment is Ljubi bližnjega svoga. The adjective bližnji, corresponding to the English neighbor as used in the commandment, means 'one who is close to you’, so that the commandment can be incorrectly translated as 'Love those who are close to you’. (Christian theologians in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia usually say that this admonition commands us to love all fellow humans.) It would be a distortion of the Biblical commandment to interpret neighbor in English the way it is used today (‘nearby resident’) [5]. In nearly all languages I have examined [6], the English noun neighbor as used in Love thy neighbor corresponds to words largely synonymous with the Bosnian bližnjeg. In fact, because of the great degree of formal similarity among Slavic languages, the words occurring in place of bližnjeg are cognates of this Bosnian adjective. In all German translations of the Bible, neighbor corresponds to Nächsten (not Nachbar!), which in the context of this particular commandment means ‘next of kin’ and, metaphorically, anybody who lives geographically close to us; other Germanic languages have cognates of Nächsten. The following are words corresponding to neighbor in Romance languages: Latin proximum, French prochain, Spanish prójimo, Portuguese próximo, Italian prossimo; they all refer to those who live geographically close to us, and can be interpreted as all of humanity. There are two interesting translation equivalents of Love thy neighbor: the Weymouth translation of the New Testament has Thou shalt love thy fellow man as thou lovest thyself, thus correcting the NTE which produced neighbor, and a Turkish translation which has komşunu, an exact equivalent of neighbor, no doubt resulting from an English translation.
The Bible has been translated into English many times and from different languages. (In the authorized King James Version, the New Testament was translated from Greek and the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew, while the Apocrypha was translated from Greek and Latin.) It is well nigh impossible to find out which translator came up with the NTE that produced neighbor, but it is perfectly logical to suppose that the commandment had a word in a source language that referred both to immediate neighbors and all humankind. The "naïve" English translator chose to render the meaning of immediate neighborliness rather than the broader sense implying all humankind.
There are many ways in which NTEs can be used to improve learning a foreign language. They can and should be used by teachers whose L1 is the same as their students’, which is the situation of most EFL classes around the world. I suggest the following uses of NTEs:
Step 1.
Students are taught the notion of NTE. In explaining the notion, the teacher uses examples of errors caused by NTEs from the students’ L1. (These should be easy to find: past translations that the students have done are bound to have NTE errors.)
Step 2.
Students are assigned to find NTE errors in their classmates' translations. They should also be required to explain each error. For example, *say something on English, *come back for five minutes (the intended sense being ‘in five minutes’), *the road for Sarajevo, and *I know for your book are NTE errors because the most frequent English translation equivalent of Bosnian na is on (first example) and the most frequent English translation equivalent of the Bosnian za is for (the other three examples).
Step 3.
The teacher prepares L1 texts for translation into English, bearing in mind a particular lexical or grammatical problem arising from the interference of corresponding English words/grammar. After the students translate a text, NTE errors are discussed in class with the purpose of learning/reviewing the particular lexical/grammatical elements in English. For example, speakers of Slavic languages sometimes make mistakes of this type: *This dish smells nicely and *It feels well here because compliments of perception verbs in Slavic languages are adverbs, not adjectives as in English (This dish smells nice/good, It feels good here). If students are then drilled to use the proper English form in such sentences, they will most likely cease to make errors of this kind.
I am sure that foreign-language instructors of students with a particular L1 can come up with pedagogical methods and devices in which NTEs can be used profitably. In fact, I believe that the use of NTEs can improve English teaching and learning considerably.
An overwhelming proportion of research and writing on teaching and learning EFL presupposes a teacher who is a native speaker of English (I will call this monolingual teaching). Also, if teaching takes place in an English-speaking country, students in a typical class are usually of different nationalities and language backgrounds. Statistically, however, such situations are a small minority of the situations in which English is taught around the world. Millions of English teachers in China, for example, are L1 speakers of a Chinese language, as are their students. A linguistically sophisticated English teacher, who speaks an L1 other than English, can use the other language, shared by her/his students, to teach English more efficiently than a teacher who only knows English. Such a teacher can demonstrate to her/his students what it is they know when they know their L1; for example, s/he can tell them that a noun phrase in their language is made up of a noun followed by an adjective (French maison blanche), or that a verb of perception takes an adverb in its complement, as in Slavic languages. After that, s/he can tell her/his students how a particular English structure differs from the corresponding structure in their L1. Thus, native speakers of French need to be told that, in English, an adjective precedes a noun and speakers of a Slavic language have to know that English perception verbs take adjectives in their complements, not adverbs.
Whenever we teach somebody something new (knowledge or skill) that is similar to something they already know, we use their previous knowledge or skill and just tell them how the new knowledge/skill differs from their previous knowledge or skill. Somebody who knows how to drive a motorbike can learn how to drive a car simply by learning how car driving is different from motorbike driving. But knowledge of car driving is conscious, whereas knowledge of the structure of one’s L1 is not. This means that the English teacher whose L1 is not English has to be linguistically sophisticated about the structure of her/his L1 and should be able to observe the differences in the structure of the two languages. (Teaching English in which both the teacher and the students make use of the L1 can be conveniently called bilingual teaching.)
The overwhelming majority of academics who carry out research and write about foreign language teaching are L1 speakers of English, mostly from the UK and the US; among them, a large majority are concerned with teaching English to foreigners. This is understandable in the light of the whirlwind growth of English as the number one international language. But TEFL is a huge business too: armies of native-English-speaking teachers travel the world and make good money teaching their mother tongue in every corner of planet Earth. Also, thousands of Britons, Americans, Australians, etc. make a living teaching English in their own countries. Countless books and video or audio materials are produced almost on a daily basis and sold to millions of buyers around the world. And we should not forget the thousands of learners who visit the UK, US, Australia, and Canada for months or even years for the express purpose of learning English; they contribute significantly to their host countries' tourist industries (we might call it the English Learning Industry).
Most of the theorizing about teaching EFL has been based on the premise that the teacher doesn’t know the L1 of her/his students and cannot use it in teaching. True, there are occasional remarks about “negative transfer” from the L1, but most authors of TEFL books play down the interference of the structure of the learners’ L1 [7]. There is no doubt that teaching English through English is easier for native speakers of the language because they don’t have to learn the language of their students. If knowledge of the students’ native language were a requirement for teaching positions, financial gains from TEFL would be dramatically reduced. It is unfortunate that such commercial considerations have channeled research aimed at improving the teaching of English almost exclusively towards monolingual teaching, with no serious scientific efforts to explore the huge potentials of bilingual teaching. I am not saying that English cannot be taught without reference to the L1 of the learners; indeed, such teaching is inevitable in many situations. What I am saying is that in the by far more common situations in which the teacher and the students share an L1, English can be learned more efficiently, i.e. faster and more thoroughly [8]. I submit that this can be achieved primarily by making various uses of Naïve Translation Equivalents [9].
Author's note: I would like to thank Saba Risaluddin for her role in editing this article.
1. Ridjanović, M. 1983. How to learn a language, say English, in a couple of months. English Teaching Forum, January.
2. The link is www.translationjournal.net/journal/65naive.htm
3. In the Balkans all aspects of public life of national import are Balkanized, sometimes with no basis in reality. This is the case of language too. We thus have four names—Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian—for a single language, which I will call Bosnian. The grammars of the four "languages" are the same and lexical differences between them are few and far between.
4. Ridjanović, M. 2012. Bosnian for Foreigners : With a Comprehensive Grammar. Rabic, Sarajevo.
5. Which is what a naughty American did on his bumper sticker that read Love your neighbor but don't get caught.
6. The Internet link http://mlbible.com/mark/12-31.htm gives 83 renderings of Love thy neighbor in about 50 languages.
7. In a book on foreign language teaching an American methodologist claims, in a section devoted to contrastive analysis, that only four percent of learners' errors can be ascribed to L1 interference. Careful error analysis shows, however, that at least 50% of all errors can be traced to differences between the L2 being learned and the L1 of the learner.
8. Some 30 years ago I taught an experimental three-week English course at an educational institution in the Croatian city of Split. The native language of the learners was used maximally. After completing the course students were able to converse in English fairly easily about ordinary matters.
9. A welcome by-product of bilingual teaching is a degree of grammatical sophistication that is acquired by students in the process of learning a foreign language.
Please check the English Language Improvement for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English Language Improvement for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Business English: A Hands on Approach at Pilgrims website.
|
