Quote of the (however long it's been since the last Quote of the Week)
As I've mentioned before, most of my students have to write journals of various levels of difficulty. This week I received one that reads as follows:
Today is rainingI don't like the raining The rain smell is very terrible and rain is dirty I want the this the rainday is no!
What was most striking to my was the similarity the last 'the' heavy sentence bore to one of the 'questions' [note the lack of a question mark] in the science book this week:
Why does the eagle doesn't not fall off the edge of an object.
However, neither of these examples can remotely touch a journal Will got in one of his classes:
Topic: Eat milk or yogurt, cheese muchI have my healthy habit. This is very important to people. Sometimes people is don't want eat food, made milk for due [fondue?] for they, They are so glad and we was have a shit a brick and constipation, we need to read my story. Milk, chees and yogurt is delicious and very famous. We say they milk products We eat milk every day. So, milk is very friendly, But others are we eat sometimes. So, we are have shit a brick or constipation. We eat milk 3 times in a day.
I'm pretty sure this was written in all innocence, and just shows how hard it is for pocket translators to translate things in a non-literal way. I'm betting that she looked up synonyms for constipation and the translator was just plain wrong on the meaning of 'shit a brick', and missed the coloqualism.
4 comments:
What kind of translator would produce "shit a brick?" Don't most avoid providing profanity unless explicitly asked?
Is it common for your students to just string a bunch of pocket-translator phrases together?
Also, it seems like this is quite a complicated thought/writing task for a 1st or 2nd grader (or is this from an older student? I look back at some of my really old writing sometimes and, while it doesn't approach this, its not pretty.
The translator theory is just our best guess given the weirdness of the journal. Perhaps she heard 'shit a brick' from someone or on TV and looked up the component parts on her translator. On that note, yes, it is very common to get a string of translator-generated gibberish (i.e word by word translations that are not quite right) from our students.
Korean schooling is way way harder than anything we did, at least early on. Our schools get progressively more difficult, but theirs ease off (to a level that is still higher than where ours built to, at least pre-college). I teach three year olds stuff in their second language that Americans wouldn't be expected to know until they were seven. I have elementary school students who write picture perfect essays in their second language on a weekly basis, and I'm pretty sure I was never asked to write an essay until the seventh grade, and even then we had a ton of guidance, as opposed to my school's policy of just telling the students that they have an essay due on Monday. I'm sometimes appalled at the things I demand from my students, especially when I remember that this is all on top of their actual school and the actual school's homework. It's like the famous psych experiment where they made a random group prison guards and the the rest prisoners: I conform to the role I am cast in and am unforgiving in acting out the part. I separate kids from their friends in class, punish them for not doing the loads of work we do, etc, just because that's what teachers do.
:(
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