3 How to put translation in your classroom in five steps
Teachers are busy people. So, while teaching with translation may be an ideal vehicle for navigating new language-teaching terrain, if you already have a road to drive on and a map for finding your way, so much the better. This section will provide both by outlining the steps for implementing translation in your classroom. These include determining if you have a “road” to drive on by ensuring that your students are ready and by determining if you already have content that translation activities can be built around. They also include mapping your activity by establishing learning objectives for your students and then planning it once you have objectives. The final step will be a look back at the road traveled–assessment and reflection.
Step 1: Determine what your students can do
The first step for implementing translation into your classroom is to determine what type of translation activity is appropriate for your students’ level. While translation activities can be implemented at any level, intermediate to advanced proficiency levels provide for the most options. Suggestions for adapting activities to different levels are included in Step 4.
Step 2: Determine if you have content that you can build around
You have students that are ready, so the next step is to think about content. While you can go off-roading and add completely new translation-based content into your curriculum, we need to return to the idea of TABP (Teachers are Busy People). If you are already an in-service teacher, you know that it will be easier to incorporate translation into something that you are already doing. Therefore, determine if there is a project, unit, or other content already in your curriculum that it would make sense to use translation pedagogy with. For example, our teacher was already doing a unit on home remedies in her intermediate high school Spanish course, so she added in the translation activity on bilingual editions of children’s books mentioned in the introduction, utilizing a book on home remedies. You will also want to determine at what point in the lesson it makes sense to incorporate the activity.
If you are working with the previously-mentioned multiliteracies framework, at this point you might want to keep in mind the framework’s transformed practice prong (Kern, 2000). If an activity is incorporated as transformed practice, it would generally come as a followup activity to another component of the framework, such as situated practice (writing to design meaning), overt instruction, and critical framing (attending to how linguistic forms and social contexts are interrelated). In transformed practice, learners apply their knowledge in real-world situations, thus making new meaning and transforming their prior knowledge (2000). For example, if students translate a text after reading it, this is a way of transforming their knowledge (2000).
Step 3: Determine your goals or objectives
As you start to formulate your translation activity, ask yourself what your goals or objectives are for your students. In addition to the immediate learning goals of the lesson, keep in mind that translation pedagogy can broaden student learning on multiple fronts (see Section 2 of this manual):
- linguistic
- cultural
- literacy, including reading comprehension, writing, critical thinking, long-term memory, and organizing and deciding skills
- translanguaging, or moving fluidly between two languages
- negotiation of meaning
- heritage language learning
- appreciation of heritage language and culture for heritage speakers
A review of ACTFL’s standards and can-do statements might also help you to narrow your objectives within the context of your desired activity. Let’s use a medical intake interview translation activity as an example (see Section 6 for full activity). This is an activity in which students translate portions of a medical intake form and simulate a medical intake interview. See Table 1 for examples of modified medical intake activity objectives.
Table 1
| ACTFL statement | Medical intake activity objectives |
| In my own and other cultures, I can identify products and practices to help me understand perspectives. | Through the translation process, I can make comparisons between products and practices to help me understand perspectives in my own and other cultures. |
| I can interact with others to meet my needs in a variety of situations, sometimes involving a complication…and asking a variety of questions | I can use translation to participate in and meet my needs in spontaneous spoken medical conversations, creating sentences and series of sentences to ask and answer a variety of questions in a multilingual form using translation |
| I can communicate information…and express my thoughts about familiar topics, using sentences and series of connected sentences through spoken, written, or signed language | I can use an intake form to participate in a multilingual medical clinic simulation, using sentences and series of connected sentences through spoken and written language |
Step 4: Plan the activity
Plan your activity, keeping in mind your learners’ capabilities and the time you have available. If this is your first or one of your first translation activities, you may want to take as your point of departure one of the examples in published works (e.g. Colina and Lafford, González-Davies, Carreres) and modify it according to your needs. Another option is to start with one or two brief activities as part of a longer lesson. Most translation activities can be modified according to your learners’ levels.
Let’s return to the medical intake translation activity. For the vocabulary part of the activity, students do preliminary vocabulary translation prior to the interview. The activity could be modified as shown in Table 2.
Table 2: Medical intake interview activity modifications
| Level | Modification |
| Pre-intermediate | Use a limited word bank and teacher-selected online dictionary to look up words as needed to fill in key vocabulary on the medical intake form |
| Intermediate | Use an expanded word bank for about half of the words on the form and an online dictionary as needed to fill in key vocabulary on the medial intake form, or, students receive medical intake form with a limited number of blanks (again, about half) for them to look up using a teacher-selected online dictionary. If the second, the instructor should discuss the difference between medical vocabulary that doctors would use and lay vocabulary that would appear on an intake form which the general public would be more familiar with. |
| Advanced | Give students a medical intake form with more blanks to look up using a teacher-selected an online dictionary. If the second, the instructor should discuss the difference between medical vocabulary that doctors would use and lay vocabulary that would appear on an intake form which the general public would be more familiar with. |
Of course, you will also want to consider the amount of time you have available and adjust the activity accordingly. For the vocabulary portion of the activity, this might again entail expanding or limiting the amount of vocabulary students work with, whether they use a word bank, etc.
Step 5: Assess and reflect
Finally, you’re at a stopping place. How is the view looking back? You will want to assess student learning and reflect on your implementation process. The translation products your students produce may serve as informal or formal learning assessments and should align with your learning objectives (cite), so you will want to determine in advance how you will use student work to that end. If you choose to include reflection in your process, you may want to reflect both on the logistics of how your implementation went and on your students’ learning. You might include your students in the reflection process, asking them questions such as how the implementation went, how the translation process affected their linguistic and cultural understanding, how they negotiated meaning, or if there were elements added into their learning process that are otherwise absent in their language learning. You can ask yourself the same questions.
Moving On
The next section will include two sample activities with in-depth explanations of how to use them in your classroom.