Sonia Rocio Lopez

TASK 2. ESSAY

“Atkinson (1987) suggests that activities that involve some translation promote guessing strategies amongst students and helps reduce the word-for-word translation that often occurs and which results in inappropriate L2 use”.

The idea to learn a second language is always to understand in that language what someone is trying to say, also if that need to be translated to someone else either L1 to L2 or viceversa. So that in terms of having a well understanding of the language is necessary to promote translation; strategy as guessing it is a good one, on the other hand there is the word by word strategy, or the ones who just dislike the guessing will make the way longer, since the students will not understand some words without having been explained previously. So that it is important to evaluate both sides of the idea or strategy

The guessing strategies to translate from L2, are important when the words are similar in L1 in this case could be in Spanish for instance words like, really (realmente), strategy /strategia), and so on, also when a sentences, phrases or sayings are well known in Spanish, for instance we have:  “better safe than sorry” (más vale prevenir que curar).

This is a good strategy when students of L2 have a high level and if it will be developed in difficult topics as legal documents, technical sheets, scientific studies and so on.

On the other hand we have guessing strategies with basic students of L2, which will not be well done, since these students still need more vocabulary and grammar handle, depending also if the text to be translated is in accordance with the level students have; also if that will be well handle from the leader, otherwise the translation will have problems, this is a statement if the translation is from English to native language. They for sure will have a higher handle from native language than second language one but if they are guessing they will not get the idea and just will be a bunch of words what they see.

Guessing strategies are good enough when they are will explained to students and when they know what the topic is about, this will let them learn more vocabulary and they will understand how to express an idea knowing that a literal translation is not always necessary since each language has its rules and ways to speak and write. Also these strategies should be more used than doing word-for-word translation, which takes more time and is a lot information to process.

TASK 3: MIND MAP