Dịch thuật có làm tăng khả năng đọc hiểu?

Xê Nho Nvp Chị Phương Anh nên mở cái blog giúp đọc hiểu bởi theo tôi đọc hiểu quan trọng hơn dịch nhiều. Dịch là một kỹ năng khác, nếu thành thạo thì quá tốt nhưng dùng nó làm công cụ để đọc hiểu thì chưa chắc đã hiệu quả.

Xê Nho Nvp

Học tiếng Anh, tôi nghĩ khó là giai đoạn sau, khi đã học được ít nhiều nhưng nhiều người vẫn có cái cảm giác thiếu thiếu cái gì đó, khó xác định. Cái thiếu đó, theo tôi, là khả năng đọc hiểu. Hay nói cách khác, lúc đó vấn đề không phải là ngôn ngữ nữa – vấn đề là nền tảng kiến thức để tiếp nhận thông tin mới, bất kể vỏ bọc ngôn ngữ (tức là bất kể nó được thể hiện bằng tiếng Việt hay tiếng Anh).
Lấy ví dụ một hai cái tít vừa xuất hiện trên báo. “Chinese Tourists Find a Movable Feast Best Left Behind” là một tít trên tờ New York Times. Đọc tít này rồi dịch ra tiếng Việt cũng chẳng giúp gì việc đọc hiểu. Nhưng nếu biết “A Movable Feast” là nhan đề một cuốn tự truyện của Hemingway viết về thời gian ông sống ở Paris, một thời gian khó quên với ông thì chúng ta biết là bài báo sẽ nói về lý do vì sao du khách Trung Quốc vỡ mộng về kinh đô hoa lệ và cố quên những ngày vật và vật vưỡng ở Paris.

Hay một tít khác “Doubling Down on Democracy” trên tờ The Atlantic. Chơi bài mà double down là xẻ tay bài thành hai, nâng mức ăn thua lên gấp đôi, kiểu như tháu cáy. Ở đây, bài báo nói về nỗi thất vọng khi kinh tế thị trường sống khỏe ở đủ loại thể chế, từ độc tài đến quân phiệt chứ không hẳn chỉ dân chủ. Ví dụ ở Nga hay Trung Quốc hiện đang tồn tại những nhà nước mà kinh tế thì theo tư bản, chính trị thì toàn trị và tư tưởng thì theo dân tộc chủ nghĩa. Nhưng Fukuyama, người từng viết bài “The End of History” nay vẫn “đặt cược vào dân chủ” – được ăn cả ngã về không.
Tuy nhiên không phải tít nào cũng cứ tìm hiểu theo dạng thành ngữ như thế. Đọc bài “To Solve Prison Crowding, Norway Goes Dutch” của Bloomberg mà cứ tra cụm từ “go Dutch” rất dễ nhầm qua nghĩa ai ăn nấy trả. Go Dutch ở đây chỉ đơn giản là nhà tù Na Uy hết chỗ, họ bèn qua Hà Lan nhờ nước này giữ tù giùm họ.

1. http://confbank.um.ac.ir/modules/conf_display/conferences/llt/cd25.pdf

Results showed no difference.

2. http://www.ijllalw.org/finalversion3419.pdf

Results proved translation effective!

3. http://www.mcser.org/images/stories/JESRJOURNAL/Jesr_May_2012/seyed%20mohammad%20hosseini%20maasoum%20applying%20translation%20in%20efl.pdf

Results proved effective, and ss welcome the use of mother tongue!

4. muốn dịch tốt cần đọc tốt - hai khả năng này đi đôi với nhau

http://asian-esp-journal.com/journal-index/article-index/2009/210-using-translation-and-reading-comprehension-of-esp-learners-may-2009-volume-5-issue-1

The results of the data analysis showed a significant relationship between using translation and reading comprehension. In short, the findings are indicative of the effective role of translation and, accordingly, the necessity of emphasizing the contribution of the mother tongue to teaching of ESP materials.

5. http://www.iasj.net/iasj?func=fulltext&aId=22709


6. Contribution of reading comprehension to translation - http://www.iasj.net/iasj?func=fulltext&aId=22709

7. http://www.na-businesspress.com/JHETP/negari_abstract.html -
is study attempts to investigate the role of translation in improving EFL learners’ reading

comprehension. To that end, 120 learners studying English at different Language Institutes were selected.

The Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency (Corrigan, 1979) was administered to determine

their level of proficiency. The participants were randomly assigned to two control and two experimental

groups. The results demonstrated that translation technique affects the learners’ reading comprehension

at the intermediate level of language proficiency. The findings of the study will be applicable in teaching

language skills, translation studies and lesson planning.

Người học lúng túng vì thiếu kỹ năng dịch (The Guardian)

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jun/15/learners-are-getting-lost-without-translation
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Learners are getting lost without translation skills

The drive to banish learners' mother tongues from classrooms denies them the vital skill of negotiating meaning between two languages, which is why translation needs to come in from the cold

• Maurice Claypole
• Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 15 June 2010 14.00 BST

On the express train from Karlsruhe to Cologne, a German passenger is reading engineering documentation in English and using his mobile phone to pass on the content in German. In the back office of a Pforzheim jewellery company, a member of the advertising team is working on the English language version of the company's website, using the existing German version as her source material. Meanwhile, a colleague in Idar-Oberstein is rewriting an incoming email from India for the benefit of her local line manager.

All of these industry professionals – the backbone of the German economy – are required to practise a skill in which they have received little or no formal training. They have attained a reasonable degree of proficiency in spoken English through a succession of language courses that routinely promote the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking, but tend to neglect the fifth skill, that of translation.

Although translation exercises are included in the syllabus of state schools, they are generally absent in the further education sector. The majority of Germany's 957 Volkshochschulen, which provide over six million hours of language training to just under 2 million learners each year, favour communicative language teaching (CLT) which focuses almost entirely on oral practice in the target language.It is perhaps also significant that while state-schools teachers are drawn almost entirely from the local population, the adult education sector includes a high percentage of native English speaker teachers who received their training in an English-only environment in which translation was not an option.

The practice of translation has been referred to as "the poor relation of language teaching" while others see it as "the most important channel of intercultural dialogue", but however you define it, you can't ignore it, for the simple reason that all language learners are to some degree translators and need to become accustomed to negotiating meaning between two or more languages.

Much of the negative reputation of the use of translation as a teaching aid stems from the fact that translation is strongly identified with the grammar/translation method. This first systematic method of teaching and learning English as a foreign language was introduced in Prussia in 1783 and held sway throughout Europe until the second half of the 20th century. Any mention of translation exercises today evokes an image of students learning grammar by rote and struggling through the brain-torturing translation of literary texts.

And here we encounter a further hurdle: to many teachers in Germany, the use of the home language in English classes is taboo or limited to administrative tasks.

In private sector corporate language training, feelings run high. Many teachers believe passionately in banishing the students' mother tongue from the classroom. Donal Elsted of Lernerleben, emphasises the experiential aspects of language learning. "Using the target language only is the god of ELT. It is the teacher's mission," he said. "Students come to me because they want to hear me speak English, not German." Not everyone agrees. Michael Lewis, author of The Lexical Approach, has described this situation as "the teacher trying to keep the two languages apart and the student trying to put them together".

When asked if they use translation in class, most language professionals think of translating key phrases orally for the benefit of students, but rarely consider the more formal use of translation as an aid to learning.

Sometimes the discussion comes down to a matter of definition. Karen Adam Bohley, English trainer at a major automotive supplier in Coburg, sums up the situation in the corporate language training sector: "We make use of the students' mother tongue in class and use source material in the home language, but draw the line at formal translation exercises. Sometimes students translate without being aware of it. We might compare a website in English and German, but we don't call it translation."

She also quotes the dilemma faced by the teacher of an adult learner who had seen the Nespresso advert featuring George Clooney and John Malkovich. The German subtitles translate an exhortation to "make an educated guess" into German as dreimal darfst du raten (you've got three guesses). Naturally enough, the student wanted to know if this idiomatic translation was "right". Few teachers are trained to cope with such instances of contextual translation, although the world around us is rife with such practice.

However, the big picture is neither uniform nor static and a new trend is emerging. Evan Frendo, a teacher trainer based in Germany, says that teaching translation to students of business English is "absolutely the right thing to do. It's a skill they need." This is echoed by Stefan Gee, responsible for all commercial trainees at Henkel Düsseldorf, who frequently asks his students to translate both authentic and trainer-authored emails in both directions, seeing this as a "free practice exercise".
It is also a fact of life that whatever the teacher does, students use bilingual resources outside the classroom, frequently making use of online dictionaries and parallel text resources such as company documentation and websites present in several languages. Outside the classroom, translation is the norm.

Furthermore, learning practices are in a state of flux. Not only in Germany but all over the world native speakers of English are becoming more easily accessible. Web 2.0 technologies now enable learners of English to link up with a native-speaker teacher at relatively little cost. With 57% of German households on broadband, learners no longer need to rely on their local teacher for native-speaker guidance. One consequence of this could be a shift in the role of the face-to-face trainer from pronunciation coach and language provider to language transfer facilitator.

There are signs that previously under-used methodologies such as translation are being re-examined and revitalised. Indeed, there are numerous ways of putting this key skill back into the classroom in a lively and motivating manner, not least the selection of relevant and entertaining source material in audio and video formats as well as in writing, the use of back translation, translation chains, language transfer and decoding games as well as the exploration of existing bilingual texts.

Ian McMaster, editor-in-chief of the English teaching magazine Business Spotlight compares the current situation to that of dictation: "It's like a pendulum that swings to and fro. Dictation went out of fashion and came back. The same thing could happen to translation. It's a matter of finding new ways to do it."

Maybe it is time to reawaken interest in the fifth skill and rescue it from semi-obscurity.
• Maurice Claypole is pedagogical director of LinguaServe and author of Controversies in ELT

Dịch cụm từ "short of" sang tiếng Việt như thế nào? - Phần 1

"Short of" là một cụm từ phổ biến trong tiếng Anh, nhưng không hẳn là dễ hiểu/dễ dùng đối với người học Việt Nam. Một lý do là cụm từ này có nhiều chức năng với nhiều nghĩa khác nhau, trong khi nhiều người chỉ hiểu có một nghĩa là "thiếu" (ví dụ như trong câu: I am short of money - Tôi đang thiếu tiền/đang cháy túi đây.).

Để hiểu rõ nghĩa của từ này, các bạn có thể đọc bài Nghĩa của cụm từ "short of" trên trang VOA Tiếng Việt (tại đây: http://www.voatiengviet.com/content/hoi-dap-anh-ngu-nghia-cua-cum-tu-short-of/1949388.html). Một bài giải thích khá rõ ràng, kèm thí dụ và giải đáp thắc mắc nữa.

Còn nếu bạn ... làm biếng, thì xin giải thích ngắn ở đây. Nói vắn tắt, "short" trong "short of" trước hết là tính từ, với nghĩa là "less(er)/few(er) [than]". Trong cụm "short of", ta có cấu trúc ADJ + prep tương tự như keen on, interested in, fond of .... Như vậy, cụm "short of" dùng theo cách này khá dễ hiểu đối với người Việt, vì "short" có nghĩa là "thiếu", "chưa đủ", còn thiếu cái gì thì thêm "of + N" là xong. Tôi thiếu tiền mặt/ I am short of cash, cô ấy hụt hơi/ she is short of breath, mẹ tôi lúc nào cũng cảm thấy thiếu ngủ/ my mother always feels short of sleep .... Dễ quá, phải không?

Ngoài chức năng tính từ thì "short of" còn được dùng trong các thành ngữ mà tốt nhất là chúng ta chấp nhận không phân tích dài dòng làm gì cho nó ... mệt đầu, chỉ cần dùng đúng.

Thành ngữ hay gặp nhất là "nothing short of" với  chức năng là trạng từ, có nghĩa là "tương đương với", "chẳng kém gì", "quả là". Cả thành ngữ này chỉ đóng vai trò nhấn mạnh, tương tự với "truly", "really", "as ... as". Ví dụ như trong những câu sau:

The implications seemed nothing short of revolutionary. (Câu này lấy ở đây: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52349/how-should-i-understand-short-of-in-this-sentence).

Bản dịch gợi ý của tôi:
Ý nghĩa của điều ấy có vẻ cũng mang tính cách mạng không kém.

Một câu khác, cũng lấy từ đường dẫn vừa được giới thiệu ở trên:

President Barack Obama says the savage storms that swept through the South are nothing short of 'catastrophic.' [They are as bad as catastrophic.]

Và bản dịch của tôi:
Tổng thống Obama cho biết những cơn bão hung tợn đã quét qua miền Nam [nước Mỹ] quả là tai họa.

Một thành ngữ khác với ý nghĩa tương tự là "(a) little short of". Chú ý nếu "little" không có mạo từ "a" đi theo thì được dùng theo nghĩa phủ định, cho nên "little short of" thật ra cũng chỉ là "nothing short of" mà thôi. Còn nếu có "a" thì nghĩa nhẹ đi một chút, dịch sang tiếng Việt là "gần như", "có thể nói". Ví dụ như trong câu này (lấy từ trang này: http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/58230-small-built-a-little-short-of-pretty):

A young woman, built small and just a little short of pretty, was sitting directly across from him.
Một cô gái trẻ, nhỏ nhắn và gần như/có thể nói là đẹp, đang ngồi đối diện trực tiếp với anh ta.  
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Well, tạm thời là thế. Dưới đây là một bài tập nho nhỏ: Các bạn có thể dịch những câu sau đây sang tiếng Việt được không?

1. Chestnut Hill student with cancer was originally told she wouldn't be able to participate in commencement because she was three credits short of degree.

2. For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard.

3. Are you running short of writing prompts?

4. A new report by Moody's Investors Service finds that public pensions are $2 trillion short of the amount they owe current and future retirees.

5. State tax collections fell short of expectations by $281 million last year.

6. He was short of building materials, he was short of staff, he was short of time—in fact he was short of everything, Höss objected.

7. He was ambitious enough to be contented with nothing short of the highest rank of overseers, and persevering enough to reach the height of his ambition.

8. When Nelson Mandela became South Africa's president on May 10 1994, he was two months short of his 76th birthday.

9. Even in his eighties, he was never short of exciting ideas. 

10. The weight he lost was 3 pounds short of his targeted loss.  
 
Trả lời xin gửi vào comment các bạn nhé. 

Dịch thuật như một công cụ học tập (Tim Bowen, One Stop English)

Dẫn: Bài viết này là của một chuyên gia về giảng dạy tiếng Anh (người Anh), nêu quan điểm về việc sử dụng dịch thuật như một công cụ học tập mà các giáo viên ngoại ngữ có thể sử dụng để nâng cao hiệu quả giảng dạy của mình. Cần lưu ý rằng đây là một quan điểm khá mới mẻ so với quan điểm hiện đang "thống trị" trong giới, đặc biệt là đối với những người ủng hộ cách tiếp cận "giao tiếp" (communicative approach) trong giảng dạy ngoại ngữ. 

Nói vắn tắt, cách tiếp cận giao tiếp gần như cấm sử dụng tiếng mẹ đẻ trong lớp học vì điều đó làm cản trở việc "giao tiếp" trong ngôn ngữ đích (tức là ngoại ngữ mà ta đang học). Tuy nhiên, theo tác giả của bài viết này thì có nhiều lý do khiến ta có thể tận dụng kỹ năng dịch thuật trong lớp học ngoại ngữ để làm cho việc giảng dạy thú vị hơn và có hiệu quả cao hơn.

Xin mời các bạn. À, ai thích dịch thì có thể dịch bài này và gửi vào comment để chúng ta cùng bình luận và học các bạn nhé.

Nguồn: http://www.onestopenglish.com/support/methodology/teaching-approaches/teaching-approaches-translation-as-a-language-learning-tool/146504.article
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Teaching approaches: translation as a language learning tool

By Tim Bowen

Level: Starter/beginner, Elementary, Pre-intermediate, Intermediate, Upper intermediate, Advanced Type: Reference material

An article discussing the benefits of translation as a language learning tool.

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Translation has not always enjoyed a good press [1]. Indeed, at the height of what we can call the "communicative" period, it was actively discouraged by many practitioners and regarded as a hindrance to second language fluency rather than an aid to language learning. In the brave new world of the Communicative Approach, translation (and the use of the mother tongue in general) came to be regarded as a relic of the past, a symbol of the bad old days of Grammar Translation, an echo of those long forgotten secondary school lessons when paragraphs of English prose were translated into Latin for no apparent purpose other than as an intellectual exercise. 

Such a view, however, takes no account of individual learning styles. Some learners appear to need to be able to relate lexis and structures in the target language to equivalents in their mother tongue. This also gives them the opportunity to compare similarities and contrast differences. Put simply, they need the reassurance of their mother tongue in order to make sense of the way the target language operates. In the case of teachers, an ability to translate into the mother tongue of the learners can offer a convenient and efficient way out of a tricky situation – why bother to spend ten minutes trying to explain the concept behind a particular utterance when a simple translation can achieve the same goal in seconds? For example, it is quite difficult to get across the meaning of useful, everyday expressions such as "As far as …. is concerned, …" or "On the other hand …. ". Learning target language equivalents to key phrases like these in the mother tongue can be an extremely effective way to build up a good working vocabulary. Translation can also be extremely creative. It is not only the translation of words from one language to another but the translation of ideas, concepts and images.

Some of the resistance to translation amongst certain teachers might stem from the kind of exercise they were required to do when language learners themselves. Dull, overlong, uncommunicative texts that were difficult to translate into the target language did little for motivation. But why should translation involve whole texts? Surely it is more relevant (and practical) to start with short, communicative pieces of language. When teaching grammatical structures, it can be very useful to check with your learners that they have fully grasped the concept of the language taught by asking them to translate into their mother tongue. As a checking stage, this could usefully come at the end of the lesson. The structure used in "If I had worked harder, I would have passed the exam", for example, is relatively complex and a quick translation check can avoid misunderstandings.

An illuminating exercise is to divide your class into two groups, give each group a short text (3-4 sentences) to translate into the target language. Then get the groups to exchange papers and ask them to translate the other group’s translation back into the mother tongue. The results, when compared, can be extremely interesting and often amusing!

Finally, in case any language teachers are worried that they might be replaced by computers, here is a translation of a well-known English proverb, translated into German and then back into English by a computer programme: "If the away cat, the mice plays".

* When the cat’s away the mice will play.
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Từ vựng trong bài:
1. enjoy/get a good press
Xem định nghĩa ở đây:
♦ get a bad press/get a good press             phrase   V inflects 
(http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/get%20a%20bad%20press/get%20a%20good%20press)
If someone or something gets a bad press, they are criticized, especially in the newspapers, on television, or on radio. If they get a good press, they are praised.