Language courses and exams are designed to help you develop all the different skills you need to learn a language and be able to use it. That’s why you have reading exercises, writing exercises, listening exercises and speaking exercises. But what’s the skill in a translation exercise? Is it any different to reading? Yes! And here’s why.
Reading exercises
When you look at a Reading text, there are questions designed to make you look at the text and understand enough of it to be able to answer the questions correctly. It means they don’t expect you to be able to understand every single word or every grammatical structure in the text in order to answer the questions. Why would they want you to be able to do that?
Well, in real life, that’s a very useful skill. If you go on holiday to Spain, or another Spanish-speaking country, you’ll come across lots of texts – menus, contracts, leaflets, signs, brochures, etc. It’s unlikely you’ll understand every single word in there, but you will have to figure out what it means by using what you do know. That means, focusing on the key words and using all that you’ve learnt before to figure out as much of the meaning as you possibly can. In your courses, they pick texts for you that are aimed at the right level, but in real life it’s a bit more difficult. But the important thing is that you’ve learned that skill and now you can use it.
Translation exercises
With a Translation text, there is an entirely different skill being developed. Accuracy is vitally important. There is less room for guessing (although you’ll still need that skill!) and because it’s a short text, markers will expect you to take care and do a good job.
This is why I focus so much on learning vocabulary. Sometimes there is just no room for error and you need to know those essential, key words and verbs to get your translations accurate.
I have developed some long translations, way longer than you’ll ever need to do in a school exam, to help you practise some of the key vocabulary in each topic. The trick with learning vocabulary is to use it regularly, or else it gets forgotten. See it in use and use it yourself in writing, speaking and translation exercises and it will start to go deep into your memory and be right there when you need it.
Find my GCSE Translation resources in the Shop page. A Level Translations coming soon. (Let me know which topics you would like to see first!!)
How do I tackle a Translation?
In an exam situation you’ll need to read the whole text first before you start, but even with these long translations, you’ll still need to read at least the whole sentence before you start. Why?
Word order is completely different in Spanish and English. Even if the words are similar, and they can be understood in a weird order, you’ve got to make it sound natural. So that means what goes at the end of the sentence or phrase in Spanish might well go at the beginning in English, and vice versa.
Focus on the words you know first and understand what the gist is. Then look at the tenses of the verbs and figure out what tense it is written in. When you’re doing translations at home or for fun, you can use your dictionary to help you figure out the meaning of the words you don’t know, but use this as a last resort. Then, once you understand the whole sentence, start putting it into English, taking care to make it sound natural.
Once you’ve finished, you can hide your first translation and do it again and see how many of the words you can remember this time. In fact, you can do it over and over again until you can do it without a dictionary or a vocabulary sheet and the words are well and truly stuck in your memory.