Working Translation Magic

Students who work their way to the higher levels of foreign language classes will find themselves faced with a translation nightmare. They are often handed packets of papers with the expectation that they will walk away with an understanding of the main ideas of the packet.

Many students attack this challenge the best way that they know how--word by word. They read and understand each word as they come to it, but they don't look at the piece as a whole. Each word has it's own meaning, but doesn't necessarily contribute to the overall meaning of the piece. The task is to understand the words first, and put meaning to them later.

I imagine this is not so different from the way that a struggling reader attacks a difficult piece of literature. Or that some of our AP students go about reading their AP assignments. They all become struggling readers at some point, no matter their age or reading ability level. We have to remind them to use context clues, connotations, and the basic vocabulary that they do know in order to figure out the rest.

This was my task in an advanced Spanish class. Filled with honors level students, they weren't used to struggling with reading and I heard more than one willingly give up the fight. The Spanish teacher came to me after a recent assessment and wanted my help figuring it all out. I took an old reading strategy that I'd had some success with, and revamped it to guide the students through the piece. And it worked. It worked well. The students used for boxes to organize their knowledge: 1) what they know for sure; 2) what they are still unsure of; 3) what assumptions or inferences they can make based on their knowledge; and 4) what words they have figured out by piecing the puzzle together. Of course this new strategy was heavily scaffolded. We did several paragraphs together--filling in the boxes and then writing a 2-3 sentence translation of the paragraph. Then I let them go just a little bit. They did the boxes on their own and we shared. Then they wrote their translations based on the combined knowledge. Finally, they were on their own to do the last two paragraphs. The teacher was thrilled at the results and the kids really understood the art of skipping words you don't know and using context clues to create meaning from the piece.

I imagine that this could be used with any "translating" that students are being asked to do. Remember, we ask our marginalized learners to translate every day that they enter our classrooms. We ask them to internalize our particular vocabulary and be able to use it effectively. And we forget that there are 7 other teachers doing the exact same thing.

Click here to visit my literacy page and see a copy of "Say Something" for the translation exercise.