Thoughts from the classroom

Today I want to address this common misconception that everyone bilingual can easily translate. In education, there seems to be this tendency to grab the nearest person that can speak a given language and have them translate anything that pops up. The fact is, this is a terrible idea. People may be bilingual, but translation is a skill that must be learned. There are many reasons why this is a terrible idea, but I’m going to focus on two of the most important ones for my purposes.

The first reason that translation is a skill is that it involves a process known as code switching. This is the mental process you go through to switch between languages. Many people who grow up speaking two languages have this skill to some extent, and all bilingual people do it to a certain degree. There are three types of code-switching. I’ll be flipping between German and English in my examples. I’m a native English speaker, and I operate on a B1 level in German. (Not by any means fluent, but can hold conversations with a lot of help.) This information is taken from the Bridge Educational Group’s website where they talk about code-switching.

The first type of code switching is called “Inter-sentential switching.” This occurs when someone flips languages between sentences or clauses. They may say something such as “Heute haben die Kinder einen Prüfung. However, they won’t try on it.” The second is “intra-sentential switching”, where they just insert a word in what’s usually their first language that they may not know in their second language. For example, they could say “Ich hatte gern french fries bitte.” The last, extra-sentential switching, is when you add a phrase or exclamation at the end different from the one you started with. An example of this would be “Ich möchte mit dir gehen, leider habe ich die Grippe, you know?”

Code switching can be a fantastic educational tool for language learners, especially those in the beginner or intermediate phase of learning. However, the point of this is to point out a very important part of code-switching, and that it is a skill that sometimes must be learned, not a natural talent accessible to all bilingual people. There is also a certain amount of talent involved, despite what people think. I know this personally, because I have a terrible time code-switching. I worked hard on those above sentences, because I was mixing languages. My brain does not do that naturally.

I started noticing this problem when I was interpreting as a young adult in my first job. While the others easily flipped between English and sign language, I could not. Even with words and phrases I knew perfectly well in sign language, I had to work at it. I really thought I was just a bad interpreter. I didn’t have the same issues just talking to the kids, though. I’m no where near fluent in sign, but I didn’t really have to dig. I could find ways to get across what I wanted to say, but as long as I didn’t’ have to talk or translate it from English. Later, I had the same exact issues in learning German. I couldn’t flip between the languages. When my professor (rarely!) flipped to English, it would take me a few seconds to realize it. One day, we watching the German movie Jenseits der Stille (Beyond the Silence) that was spoken in German, closed captioned in English, and involved German Sign Language. My brain went haywire. It told me I should understand the sign, I was hearing German, but trying to read the English. I lost the two languages I could speak and didn’t understand a word of anything. I had to go back and focus on the English, then the German, and ignore the signing. The moral of all this? I’m multilingual but do not ask me to interpret. My brain quite literally just tries to stay in one language.

The second reason, and the most prominent reason is that there is a huge difference between social language and academic language. The everyday language you use in your personal interactions is your social language. You can be fluent in a language, and even a native speaker, but not be fluent in academic language. This sounds counterintuitive, but think of it this way. As a native English speaker, I can communicate on a wide variety of topics with any other native English speaker, in general. However, I would go to a lawyer if I had a legal document that needed to be read over. I don’t know all of the associated language. That’s academic language. Another example would be going to college. Many of the math classes are going to use vocabulary that you have never heard before, so you have to study what they mean. Just because you have native fluency in a language doesn’t mean that you know every single word out there. I’d also like to briefly mention dialects here. Every language has them, and they may sound quite different from the standard form of the language. This can influence the ability to translate.

So when we ask people to translate, it can be quite risky unless they are a trained translator. In the educational setting, the translator may not know some of the academic or legal language that is needed. This is especially important in cases of ARD meetings, where the minutes of the meeting is an actual legal document. Any mistake in the translation could have legal consequences for the district. Ideally, districts should have trained interpreters on hand for the languages spoken or have a budget to hire one when needed, but I understand this may not be the case. Perhaps a better solution would be a raise in pay to a teacher or paraprofessional that is willing to undergo certification, to ensure you have the best outcome. However, the practice of grabbing a random native <insert language here> speaker is going to get districts in trouble one day. We need to change this, not only as a matter of keeping the district out of trouble, but to also ensure that we are doing right by our students.