Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 6; November 02

Getting Distance between Source and Target Text

Type of class: monolingual or multilingual, providing there are at least two students per MT.

Teacher: doesn't need to know the students' MT.

Level: lower intermediate to advanced

Purpose: to help the student escape the influence of the source language when translating.

• in preparation, choose a suitable English text.
• Read them the English source text, slowly and clearly.
• Give them the text for them to read silently.
• Ask them to read along silently as you read the source text this time faster and with music in the background.
• Ask them to work in pairs with dictionaries and elucidate the meaning of any unknown words.
  Be everywhere, helping with comprehension.
• Ask partner A in each pair to read the passage to B in as English an accent as she can.
  B then reads the passage with as foreign an accent as possible.
• Ask the students to work alone and either draw a picture that illustrates the source text or a diagram that illustrates its flow.
• Partner A now explains the content of the passage to B as though B were a seven year old.
• Partner B reads the passage in English but paraphrasing as much as she can.
• You take in the source language papers.
• Person A now dictates a target language translation of the passage to B. Person A works from memory. They can discuss as much as they like.
• You give them back the source language text and they compare.

Note: The above sequence tries to help students away from the fierce “undertow” of the source language when translating.