I would like to study primarily the literal translation . While I think the natural, idiomatic translation is vital and helpful to learn, I find it sometimes problematic to focus on it rather than the literal translation. I also think learning the literal translation would expedite my learning of grammar. So ideally, I would have the translation presented be the literal one. For idioms, the literal translation would appear in brackets and the the idiomatic translation would be provided next to it in parentheses. What can happen if one primarily learns the idiomatic translation is that one might mistakenly confuse the literal translation of a word. While this is fine for the particular idiomatic sentence being studied, the word applied in a different context may be mistranslated or misused and the comprehension of the sentence and the language therefore decreased.
I am learning Spanish (Spain), and here are some examples from that course:
Spanish: "ir de paseo"
Memrise’s Current Engilsh Translation: "to go for a walk"
My Ideal translation: “to-go of walk (to go for a walk)”
- In the above, one might mistakenly believe that ‘de’ translates generally to ‘for’ in English. Now when they try to translate the English sentence ‘to go for a run’ they might come up with "ir de correr’, but that would be incorrect. It is actually ‘ir a correr’.
Spanish: "mañana no iré a la escuela"
Memrise’s Current English Translation: "I won’t go to school tomorrow"
My Ideal Translation*: “tomorrow no-I-will-go-to the school”
- In the above example, it improves one’s memory and understanding of the grammar of Spanish to primarily learn the literal translation, wherein ‘tomorrow’ is the first word of the sentence as opposed to the last, and it decreases the chance that the translator will make the error of putting ‘mañana’ at the end of the sentence. As well, there are other words in this sentence that could that could be learned as having a meaning that they do not have without the context of this particular sentence.
Spanish: "son las dos en punto"
Memrise’s Current English Translation: "it’s two o’clock"
My Ideal Translation: “they-are the two in point (it’s two o’clock)”
- In the above example all the literal translations could be learned incorrectly, as in the previous example. It is also very helpful to use the literal translation as it makes it easier to understand the different way time is described in Spanish. A similar example to this would be the translation of ‘por la mañana’ which the natural translation for is ‘in the morning’ but which the literal translation for is ‘for the morning’.
Spanish: "¿Cuántos años tienes?"
Memrise’s Current English Translation: "How old is he?"
My Ideal Translation: “How-many years he-has? (How old is he?)”
- If one reads the literal translation of the above, one can likely still comprehend the meaning, and it makes more pellucid the grammar structure. Of course, like the other examples, one can easily learn an incorrect literal translation of any of the words in this Spanish Sentence.
Spanish: "que tenga un buen vuelo"
Memrise’s Current English Translation: "have a good flight"
My Ideal Translation*: “that you-have a good flight”
- In the above example one could easily forget to include ‘que’ when translating the English sentence back to Spanish and possibly misremember which conjugation of ‘tener’ is needed as Memrise’s Current English translation does not include ‘you’.
- I am not sure if my ideal translation would include in parentheses the natural translation following the literal translation. In example 1, although the words and grammar of the literal translation are slightly different than the natural translation, it is still intelligible (in a rather Yodaesque manner, by the way). Example 5, even with ‘that’ omitted, is also still intelligible. In these cases it might be redundant to learn the natural translation. One would simply be expected to learn and know that you can’t say the natural version of the English translation literally in Spanish, and if one wanted to find the natural translation, they could refer to an alphabetically ordered vocabulary list of all the words studied (of which there isn’t yet in Memrise).
Perhaps this does not have to be the default however. It is certainly possible this is just my own preference, and I could be in the minority. Yet I would really like, at least, an option in the settings settings to switch whether the primary focus is to learn the literal or the natural translation.
Well,
Cheers!