WHY NO TRANSLATION?

Abstract

The use of translation, either word-for-word or expression-for-expression, is often found in the teaching of a foreign language. It is also frequently regarded a s an easy short-cut to attain command of the language to be learned. Teachers who have had practical up-to-date linguistic training, however, do not find it to be an entirely satisfactory technique. For the mastery of a foreign language involves more than the mere association of meaning carried by a word in the native language with that carried by another word in a foreign language. Every language is a closely and arbitrarily knitted mechanism composed of sounds and sound sequences, grammatical devices, and vocabulary items, and the details involved in this intricate relationship and the inter-play among these units are fairly rigid and limited, and vary from language to language. In other words, to memorize all the entries in a bi-lingual dictionary wi l l not enable a person to speak a foreign language. There are essential linguistic features that lie outside the realm of lexical equivalents, such a s the use of word order in English to distinguish certain statements from certain questions, the presence of one or more words functioning a s a structural signal, the use of specific expressions which may have equivalents in lexical meaning in another language but which a re used differently according to the social patterns or behavior of the people who speak the language. These and numerous other devices cannot be brought about by either word-for-word or expression-for-expression translation, and the purpose of this article is to use a few examples to show that translation is not an adequate technique in the teaching of a foreign language. Every language uses certain devices to convey meaning. The same device may be used by various languages. For example, English and Chinese both use word order a s a pattern to indicate the direction of action. The actor and the goal in