Page 36 - 4922

It is the problem more often solved subjectively by the teacher, judging from his/her own experience.
Scholar I. Ya. Retsker talked about the difficulty of the text as the degree of discrepancy between the means of
expression in the ST and the TT. These are the basic problems the teacher should solve, choosing the text for the
given exercise.

The text should be played until the students understand fully the meaning of the message. Then the
problematic places are discussed with the teacher thus the teacher can demand the translation without the lexical
literalness and stylistically relevant to the original.

This kind of exercise can be practiced regularly once a week during all the training period.

2. Translation-dictation
This is the written translation from the foreign language. The text is read by the teacher. The unknown
vocabulary is recommended to be discussed before reading the sentence where it occurs. The exercise is done as
follows: the teacher reads the foreign sentence once and the students translate it into the TL; then comes the
check stage, a student reads his/her variant of translation, other students discuss this variant, find stylistic and
semantic mistakes if any, read their variants. In the end the best variant of translation is chosen. If there is non
the teacher suggests the best variant. The difficulty is that students should listen to the sentence attentively as it
is being read only once and at the same time they should put down the translation as the interval between reading
is not very long.

3. Exercise on presicion words
Presicion words, especially unfamiliar ones are the source of many mistakes. These are words that should
be translated very accurately. To make it easier to learn these words it is advisable to group them into the
following categories:

1) names of months;
2) names of week days;
3) names of celebrities;
4) geographical names;
5) national realia.
There is no need to explain first two categories. The next one includes the names of the most known
celebrities of the given time period: names of celebrities involved in the political, economical, and cultural life of
the country the language of which is being studied; names of political leaders of the countries and parties; names
the sounding of which is different in the SL and TL.
In accordance to these principles the third group will include 30 to 40 names; the list of these names is
not constant and depends on changes in public, political, and cultural life.

The fourth category is the constant one. It does not include the world-known geographical names if their
sounding has no peculiarities as compared to the native tongue. Here the teacher chooses the most frequent
geographical names such as names of countries, rivers, and lakes.

The training of the third, fourth and fifth categories of names is similar. The words inside every category
should be subdivided into sub-categories according to the certain principles. For example the names of countries
may be subdivided into the names of European countries, American countries, Asian countries, and African
countries. Every sub-category includes no more than 10 items. The task of the students is to learn the spelling
and the sounding of 10 items. The teacher checks the knowledge of the learners through the questions as for the
sounding and dictations as for the spelling. Some other exercises to remember the presicion words are used.
4. Transformation exercise

34