This post features an idea I've written about previously on the Textivate blog. The text used (and the inspiration) came originally from an idea posted by Steve Smith (of FrenchTeacher.net) on his blog a few years ago in a post entitled "Google Translate beaters". In the post, Steve suggests a translation activity based on providing students with an L1 and L2 text, each with different words or chunks missing. Steve's idea looks a bit like what has now become known as "tangled translation", the difference being that in tangled translation the text is presented as one text that alternates between the L1 and the L2. But it's very similar in that students are required to complete both the L1 and L2 versions of the text by referring to the bits that are in the other language and translating.
A crucial part of Steve's original idea is that students are guided towards the required answer by the inclusion of letter spaces indicating the length of each word to be typed, in both the L1 and the L2. Steve suggests this as a way of providing 2-way translation which, because of the chopped up nature of each text and the dashed gaps, is practically impossible to complete using translation tools such as Google Translate. An excellent activity! :o)
Translation in TextActivities works in a similar way to Steve's example because it specifies the letter gaps to be completed. i.e. it will only accept the pre-defined translation. This makes it difficult to google translate your L1 text to the L2 because GT will only work as long as the GT translation matches the pre-defined L2 text provided by the teacher.
TextActivities translation into the L2 is a useful activity to push students to practise particular language; particular words, chunks and expressions that we think they should be able to say / write. (This blog post on working with model texts explores this in more detail.)
However, it occurred to me that we could make the activity slightly more challenging and even less google-translatable by providing L1 notes rather than the "Full English" as it were...
See the image at the top of this post for an example of this.
For this sort of activity to be successful, ideally we should make sure our resource complies with the following:
- the L1 notes should be easy to understand
- the L1 notes should be as close as possible to the order of the L2 text
- the L2 text should consist of precisely the language items that your students should be familiar with, having been exposed to them consistently in prior lessons / teaching (think model text!)
Provided the above conditions are met, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to use a whole range of translation-like tasks (such as many of those suggested in this blog post, which has examples in French, German, Italian and Spanish) with various levels of difficulty, using L1 notes as the stimulus rather than a full English L1 text.
If you can make the L1 notes include abbreviations etc that GT will not be able to translate, even better!
Below is a small selection of the activities available, for you to try, based on the sample resource shown in the image above:
- Initials (as shown above in fullscreen mode)
- Word shapes
- 3 by 3 words
- No vowels
- Jumbled words
- Anagrams
- Space
- Jigsaw rebuild (18)
Here is a link to the resource with no activities open: https://www.textactivities.com/resource-sample/15134
If you're wondering what the point of these activities is if students can access the original text via the "Resource view" tab, bear in mind that when you set assignments on TextActivities, students do NOT have access to the original text, unless you specifically want them to. (See this post on Assignments on TextActivities).
Looking for full translation from L1 to L2? See this post with all sorts of activities for you to try in French, German, Italian and Spanish:
"Translation into the Target Language (with examples in several languages)"
:o)