Motive

My motive for this post is to share with other ESL teachers what I learned from teaching a group of Arabic-speaking learners.

Classroom Observations

Work with the monolingual group experienced all the usual risks and benefits of them being monolingual. I won’t bore you with repeating the details, as I expect that you are already well-acquainted with them. All the other things that you would expect with an Intermediate class were also present: wrong tenses, single/plural agreement, etc.

What struck me was the use of electronic dictionaries to “translate” large amounts of text from Arabic into English. This highlighted a number of issues, explored below.

Mis-translation

By way of example, consider the words “resist” and “overcome”. While their meaning are similar, they are not identical, and can lead to an apparent nonsense: “to resist problems” where the author clearly meant “to overcome problems”.

Understanding

Translation from a second language into one’s own language using an automatic translator strikes me as being a valid use of such translators. Being master of one’s own tongue means that identification of translational goofs is easy, and can sometimes be a cause for amusement.

However, using such a translator to go in the other direction is fraught with dangers, and I much prefer to get a native speaker of the second language to verify the translation before I go public. I, and quite clearly my students, cannot recognise when the automatic translator gets it wrong.

Long Sentences

At this point, I am unsure about how sentences are commonly structured in Arabic. They may be long, short, or mixed by convention. What I have seen (in the two written submissions to date) is that writers have been putting long sentences (in Arabic) through the automatic translators, and producing equally long sentences whose meaning is quite impenetrable in English.

Next Steps

My immediate next step will be to encourage the learners to use much shorter sentences when they enter text into their translators. I see this as a stepping-stone to my own understanding of what they want to say, and I can then help them to understand the meanings and connotations of new words.

As see this as a pathway for these students to increase their own command of that most infernal of languages: English.