The significance of translation in teaching English.
With development of a civilization the role of the translation to mankind lives steadily increased, and in the second half of the 20th century there was an original explosion of translation activity which interfered in all new and new fields of activity and, first of all — to the spheres connected with production, scientific technical progress, the international communication. Translation communications cover the whole world today. The translation as a component of development of means of communication and mass information, participates in those cardinal changes of "the world situation" which began to be determined often by expression "the fourth industrial revolution" or to call approach of an electronic and computer century. The special reference media of UNESCO of "Index transiationum" steadily fixes from year to year increase of quantity of transfers worldwide. We can't imagine any area of social, scientific, cultural life without the translation today. For this reason the important place in the modern sphere of professional education is taken by the specialties connected with a foreign language and studying of the translation.
Changes in social and political life of the country, development and expansion of economic relations with foreign countries, a possibility of education abroad, an exchange of students and scientists have caused changes in education. The knowledge of a foreign language became one of the major requirements imposed to experts in the conditions of modern labor market. During an era of globalization of the public relations, active introduction of information technologies in practice of business and interpersonal communication became obvious that development of the country in the conditions of expansion of the international contacts is impossible without professional translators. Due to the development of the international contacts and, respectively, multidimensional cooperation with foreign experts there was a need of improvement of preparation of professional shots in the field of foreign language skills at the level coming to level of proficiency in the speech in the educated native speaker. Today requirements to level of proficiency in experts in a foreign language have significantly changed. To be able to speak a foreign language and to translate from a foreign language on native and with native on a foreign language means today not simply to acquire dictionary units and formal rules of their connection in the speech, but also to seize language idiomatic. [1, p. 37] I noted that to own idiomatic in a broad sense means to own the word of a foreign language and first of all its compatibility with in other words, its full semantic structure. The greatest difficulties for students are presented by lexical party of the speech and, first of all, the lexical units finding specific structural and semantic properties. The phrasal verbs representing unity of a verb and postposition, in particular, belong to such units. Translation is a very ancient kind of human activity. As soon as groups of people with different languages were born in human history, bilinguals appeared and they helped to communicate between collectives of different languages. With the development of the written language, written translators join oral ones. They translated different texts of official, religious and business character. Translation had the main social function at first. It made possible inter-linguistic communication of people. The spreading of the written translation opened to people the wide access to cultural achievements of other nations; it made possible interaction and inter-enrichment of literature and culture. The knowledge of foreign languages let to read original books, but not everybody can earn at least one foreign language.
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Consequently, the translation is quite actual problem nowadays. Implementation of them for students and teachers will improve subsection of each department of the educational system. Because it is such a powerful tool for information and communication, there can be much more integration of work into the language curriculum.
Russian is a part of the East Slavonic family of languages and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian tradition of translation has a long history. Writing, literature and translations were introduced in Kiev and Russian in a relatively mature form. The Greek priest Cyril and his brother Methodius who created new alphabet (now known as Cyrillic) were the first translators. Among their first translations from Greek were the New Testament, the Psalter and the Prayer Book. After Russian embraced Christianity in 988, numerous translations were made to give the converts access to the philosophical and ethical doctrines of the new religion and to the church’s rituals and customs. In the 17th century, a great number of translations of predominantly nonreligious material began to appear. Scholarly translations included topics in astronomy and astrology, arithmetic and geometry, anatomy and medicine, as well as description of various animals. The 18th century proved decisive in the development of translation in Russia. Peter the Great’s political reforms greatly expanded Russia’s economic and cultural contacts with European countries, and this created a demand for numerous translations of scientific and technical texts, as well as works of fiction. [2, p. 12]
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The 19th century can be described as the golden age of Russian translation. If the previous age had made translation a professional activity, the nineteenth century raised this activity to the level of high art. The main figures of translation of this period are Nikolai Karamzin and Vasily Zhukovsky. Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, the two Great Russian poets, also played a major role in the history of translation in Russia. Although translations occupied a relatively modest place in their poetry, they made a significant contribution to the improvement of literary translation in Russia. The years following the 1917 Revolution saw a new upsurge in translation activity. The fact that the Soviet Union was a multinational state contributed to the growing demand for translation. The scale of translation among national literatures was particularly impressive. The years of rebuilding radically changed the nature of translation practice in general and the market for translations in particular. Thus, M. Warschauer considers: “The first concept in education is implementation of didactic tasks ,cognitive activities for students. Thus translation with all its capacities and resources is an effective means for realization these aims and tasks”. [3, p. 77].
As a means of communication, the translation allows students around the world to interact with one another cheaply, quickly, and reliably, opening up the classroom to the real world in a way which has never before been possible.
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The abolition of censorship has made it possible to translate many books, which had been regarded as inadmissible on ideological or moral grounds. There has been a greater demand of English translators and interpreters, and many of them earn good money working for national or foreign firms, or joint ventures. English language comes to all spheres of life and translation from English to Russian and back is very important part of successful business and its development.
Translation is the transformation of the message of the source language to the message of the translating language. The exact translation is impossible because of a great number of languages differences in the grammar and the number of words, besides, the distinction of the cultures can influence the way of translating and its results. Translation is the art of revelation. It makes the unknown known. The translator has the fever and craft to recognize, recreate and reveal the works of the other artist. Translation is an art between tongues. Some translators tried to define the row of demands of which the good translators should be. The French humanist E. Dolet considered that a translator should keep the following five basic principles of translation:
• To understand the content of the translating text and the intention of the author perfectly;
• To know the language he translates from and the language he translates on perfectly;
• To avoid the tendency to translate word for word, because it misrepresents the original content and spoils the beauty of its form;
• To use the translation the speech forms in general use;
• To reproduce the general impression in corresponding key, produced by the original, by choosing and placing words correctly. [4, p. 216].
The translation is the multifaceted phenomenon and some aspects of it can be the subjects of the research of different sciences. In the frames of the science of translation psychological, literature critical, ethnographical and other points of translation as well as the history of translation in one or other country are being studied. According to the subject of research we use the knowledge of the psychology of translation, the theory of art and literary translation, ethnographical science of translation, historical science of translation and so on. The main place in the modern translation belongs to linguistic translation, which studies the translation as linguistic phenomenon. The different kinds of translation complement each other and strive to detailed description of the activity of the translation [5, p. 64].
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The theory of translation puts forward the following tasks:
• To open and describe the common linguistic basis of translation, that is to show which peculiarities of linguistic systems and regularities of the language operation are the basis of the translating process, make this process possible and determine its character and borders;
• To determine the translation as the subject of the linguistic research, to show its difference from the other kinds of linguistic mediation;
• To work out the basis of classification of kinds of the translating activity;
• To open the essence of the translating equivalence as the basis of the communicative identity of the original texts and the translation;
• To work out the common principles and the peculiarities of construction of the peculiar and special translation theories for the different combinations of languages;
• To work out the common principles of the scientific description of the translation process as actions of a translator of transforming the original text to the translating text;
• To open the influence on the translating process of pragmatic and social linguistic factors;
It is common knowledge that in order to provide an adequate translation, the translator must be able to sense nuances in the semantics of both the source-language and target-language texts. English phrasal verbs (e.g. give up, break in, fall out) are of great interest to me in this respect because they possess quite a number of semantic, grammatical and stylistic peculiarities, sometimes making their accurate translation into Russian difficult. Of course, in dealing with the translation of such lexical units into his or her native language, the translator can consult the appropriate bilingual dictionary, but what about the profound comprehension of why this or that phrasal verb is translated only this and not any other way?
To get a good idea of English phrasal verbs' semantic nuances, let us first look at their conceptual features. In theory, phrasal verbs are generally considered to be idiomatic combinations of a verb and an adverbial particle. The exact status of the latter is still being debated, scholars being divided on whether it is an adverb, prepositional adverb, postpositional prefix, special part of speech, etc. However, here we are interested only in the features of adverbial particles. [6, p. 78]
There is, today, a great deal of emphasis on the study of foreign languages. The ability to speak a foreign language is no longer merely an advantage – it is becoming a necessity. As a result, linguists and methodologists are looking for more effective approaches to language teaching. One of the suggested methods is translation. Until recently, translation was out of favor with the language teaching community. It was labeled “boring”, “uncommunicative”, “difficult”, “pointless” and the like, and suffered from too close an association with grammar. Today, thanks to the new communicative approach to language teaching, translation is gradually becoming recognized as a valid activity for language practice and improvement.
The reason why translation is, even today, ignored by many teachers as an effective language learning activity is mainly because teachers often feel that translation involves no oral interaction and therefore is not a communicative activity, and that it is not suited to the general needs of the language learner. Moreover, many of them consider use of the mother tongue in foreign language teaching undesirable, or feel that translation is time-consuming, boring and irrelevant. This does not have to be the case. [7, p. 211].
‘Quality translation’ attempts to prove that translation can be an interesting as well as a useful activity in language teaching. One of the main objectives of foreign language teaching is to develop a student’s ability to communicate in a target language. According to Duff, “translation develops three qualities essential to all language learning: accuracy, clarity and flexibility. It trains the learner to search flexibility for the most appropriate words accuracy to convey what is meant clarity.” Translation is an eminently communicative activity, as it naturally invites speculation and discussion. Apart from the fact that translation provides a basis for discussion and thus contributes to the improvement of speaking skills, it is also ideally suited to the practicing of other language skills. Depending on the students’ needs, the teacher can also select material to illustrate particular aspects of language and structure with which the students have difficulty in English. By working through these difficulties in their mother tongue, students come to see the link between language and usage. In addition to these merits of translation as a language-learning activity, there are also a number of other reasons for using this technique in class. One of them is the fact that translation is a very natural activity – more natural and useful than many of the fashionable activities invented for language learners.
As far as research is concerned, we aimed to find out about the place of translation in the current curriculum of English language as a school subject. The results suggest that translation, particularly of texts, is used neither sufficiently nor effectively enough. If translation as a classroom technique is to help student achieve competence in the foreign language, it must be used sensibly, systematically and on a regular basis. We consider this purposeful approach very important. There is no point in merely handing out texts to the learners with the instruction “Translate” . Students should not be required to translate without having been given practice in the skill. Furthermore, it is essential that the teacher always explains what the purpose of each activity is – the students need to know why the activity is being done.
Another important issue is the selection of material. The material must be interesting and varied, covering the full range of styles and registers. Genuine translation involves analysis of the meaning of the source text. The students should be led to consider the expressive possibilities of the target language and to discover that it is not always possible to attain exact equivalence. In this way they will learn to evaluate possible versions to see which most fully captures all the implications of the original, and will find out that they need to look beyond single words, chunks of sentences, or even complete sentences to whole stretches of text as they make their decisions. Ultimately, they will learn to translate ideas, not words. This is one of the main reasons why we consider translation of texts the most important of activities. The teacher, when selecting the material, must also consider its potential for encouraging discussion. According to Savelova, all translation should lead to discussion – without this, the use of translation in the classroom is purposeless. Pair work and group work are effective as they give students opportunity to compare and discuss their suggestions with others. All students should be equally involved in the task. The material should preferably be short, with oral translation prevailing over written. Writing can often be done in the form of notes, to be used in later discussions.
Although we have stressed the importance of activities involving the translation of texts, this does not mean that the translation of expressions of sentences out of context is irrelevant to language learning. Such material is suitable as a warm-up activity. It might involve, for example, the translation of titles of films, songs, or books. The aim of the warm-up is to motivate the students and to arouse their interest in the following activity. It also helps them prepare for it mentally, and serves as an introduction to the kind of material they will be working on.
Translation shapes our way of thinking, and helps us to understand better the influence of the one language on another, and to correct habitual errors that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Translation enables us to explore the potential of both languages - their strengths and weaknesses. Another reason for using translation in the classroom is its ability to increase the students’ power and range of expression by means of authentic and wide-ranging material, which brings the learner into touch with all styles and registers. Ultimately, to achieve language competence, which is the priority of language teaching, students need to be able to communicate both ways – into and from the foreign language. Translation as a method of language teaching is still a subject under research and continues to be one of the most frequently discussed topics among teachers of English. In our opinion, this activity should be considered in a wider range of situations than is currently the case. It can be used for language practice and improvement in a similar manner to role play, project work and conversation. We have attempted to show that translation can be introduced purposefully and imaginatively into the language learning program. Translation is ideally suited to the practicing of these skills. [8, p. 122].
Thus, the usage of Phrasal verbs at the English lesson can effectively encourage students to be involved on lesson.
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