Recently, one of my new students at Smith’s School of English, Kawanishi スミス英会話川西校 asked me to review a presentation in English that she was to make at work (she works for an large American pharmaceutical corporation). At her trial lesson in March I had assessed her as a good Red, and her subsequent lessons had supported this. However, when she showed me her slides and the script for her presentation they were so full of errors that… some points were difficult to understand. There were several types of error, the main ones being: incorrect prepositions, incorrect or missing articles, incorrect use of singular/plural, and some strange word order. I was initially surprised because her English was usually good. Then I realised, and confirmed by asking her, that she had written the whole presentation in Japanese, and then translated it into English.
I remembered what another student, a senior manager in a major public corporation had told me. He frequently had to make speeches in English to mutilingual groups. He said that earlier in his career he had written his presentations in Japanese and then translated them. Because of the great differences between Japanese and English grammar the translation had been so difficult that he had changed his approach and started writing them directly in English. This had been difficult at first, but became much easier with practice, and was a far more efficient way of approaching speech or presentation preparation.
I discussed this with my new student, and she agreed. She had started the project in Japanese because she lacked confidence in her written English. This is almost the opposite of what we usually find where students lack verbal confidence. She has agreed that she will try to start her next presentation directly in English, with my help if necessary. In the meantime I can work on building up her overall confidence in using English during our future lessons.
She told me in her lesson last night that her presentation had gone really well (and brought me a nice bottle of something as thanks).
John
Ken says
Yes John self-confidence is one of the major ingredients required to successfully master a second language and as your article so clearly highlights a major impediment to attaining language fluency is the constant distraction of translating from one language to another then back and forth.
On March 19th Al Bartle raised the issue of “Thinking in English” which is a topic dear to my heart, if our students think in English there is no need for them to translate back and forth and they will consequently rapidly become more proficient, and not get caught up with erroneous automatic translation systems.
Edward says
John,
The easiest way to avoid mistakes is to keep it simple (KIS). Translating is the long way and the wrong way. Teaching confidence and going straight at it in English is great advice. I`m certain your student will improve, gain confidence and appreciate your help. Great Job! Chiharu has also written several articles about thinking in English- I recommend them to many of our students who face similar issues.
Edward, SSE Ohtsu
Al Bartle says
The tendency is to always compose your thoughts in your native language. But this inevitably will increase the difficulty to translate the final draft into English. Your advice to write the presentation directly in English is right on but I suspect what she did was to paraphrase her subject using English that she was capable to do. But anyway, this is still a great step for her. Having translated thousands of pages of Japanese to English in my past jobs, I can say that you often have to rewrite the sentences due to the difference in how sentences are constructed in English vs. Japanese and also because Japanese tends to be noun-heavy while English takes a more active approach to expression and uses more verbs. Her experience will be a very important step in her acquisition of higher levels of English. Keep up the good work.