What are some of the strategies/activities you have found effective in teaching interpretation skill to students in your classrooms? How to teach Interpretation (Oral Translation) to a class of 40 students?
hi. different ideas should be appreciated by the teacher. then, by class discussions, they can decide the best oral translations for each utterance, best
1. Motivate students to dare to interprete or to say something.
2. Try to structurate the manifold answers, but also to show different opinions and, if happened, contradictions.
3. Develop you own interpretation in an open process of thinking and reflection also trying several paths.
4. Give the students simple methodical advice how to interprete an unknown text.
Interpreting is a very practical skill that needs practical exercises.
Assuming that you have a single language pair and are starting with sequential interpreting rather than simultaneous interpreting there are skills that can be done as a group - such as note taking - with an emphasis on how to hone into the key elements of what is said.
But then you need to apply these. One approach is to have one speaker speaking for half a minute to a minute, and two people interpreting what they say. The others need to be thinking about what the interpreters do (and could be taking their own notes) and then comment and discuss it after they've heard the translations. The discussion provides both immediate feedback to the participants but also get the others always thinking about how things could be improved.Then swap roles so that everyone has a go at each role.
A variation is to have two people having a conversation using the two languages which is then interpreted. Pretend to be Trump and Putin for instance. Having a variety of contexts and subjects is important.
If your students are beginners in interpreting as ours are, "Shadowing" is a good activity. The important thing is that I start it with L1 to L1, and then, go to L2. This activity not only trains interpreting skills, but is also good for memory, which is crucial in interpreting, and fluency. If you want to add attention split into training process, you can ask them to listen to a recording and count loudly from one onwards or 100 backwards and retell what they remembered in L1, first. The next level of difficulty would be adding simultaneous counting loudly on- and backwards one after another while listening and then summarizing the text they heard in L1 and then L2. Later, you can make the exercises more and more difficult and gradually move on to real interpreting.
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Teaching