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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 1; January 2001


Translating without the source text

Type of Class: monolingual or multilingual
Teacher: does not need to know the students mother tongue/s (see note)
Level: lower intermediate to advanced
Purpose: to help the students achieve the necessary distance from the original text.

  • Choose a pithy text in English which may interest the students. About half a page. Have the text recorded by three different voices. Bring plenty of coloured pens/pencils to class.

    - Put copies of the text up outside the classroom on a wall. Group the students in threes. Person A can only operate outside the classroom, Person B can only move inside the classroom and Person C stays seated with biro and paper at the ready. Person A in each team reads a phrase or sentence of the text outside in the passage meets Person B at the classroom door and tells him/her the words, which B then runs over and dictates to Person C

  • Halfway through the exercise stop the students and ask them to all swap roles within their threesomes.
  • Give each threesome a copy of the text to check their dictation against.

    Play the text recorded by three voices and ask the students to choose which voice is best for this passage.
    Get various people to give their reasons.

  • Group the students in sixes and ask each person to copy the whole text out, choosing the most appropriate colour to do it in.
    The students read all the copies within their group and decide which handwriting and which colour most suits the text, giving their reasons.

  • Collect in all the copies of the source text.
    Tell the students to bring the source text back to mind and translate it into their MT.

  • In a monolingual class group the students in threes to compare their translations. In a multilingual class group the students in language groups and have any isolates together.

  • Give them copies of the source text.

  • Ask them how they felt about translating a text that was gone.

    Note: if the teacher, in a monolingual class, knows the students' MT, they can offer technical help at the translation stage. If the teacher does not know the students' MT, they will not be able to help/interfere as the students grapple with translating. For us it a mute point which situation is better.

    Acknowledgement: Ignacio M. Palacios gets his students to read the source passage ten times, silently and then out loud. He takes the passage away and they translate from memory.
    In this unit we simply propose an NLP inspired enrichment of of the ten readings.

    The three person running dictation is a development of the two person version you will find in Davis' Dictation, CUP, 1989.


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