Since every human being needs food to exist, it is natural students in translation studies programs to be interested in the subject.That is because people from all backgrounds and cultures feel strongly about this issue. Whatever the language he or she speaks, everyone who needs to translate, from beginning students to professionals fluent in English, have certain beliefs related to the subject. That is because all of us have feelings about food. An indispensable part of our lives, good food also is a material component of various events such as national holidays, religious celebrations, birthday parties, wedding receptions, and gatherings with friends and neighbors.
All translation students and professionals have opinions about food and just about everything related to it. While Russian Translation Professionals like talking about borscht, German Translation workers boast about the qualities of their sausages and
Medical Translation workers just ask us to eat healthy. In addition, all translations workers have some sort of preference when it comes to a particular style of food such as fast food, junk food, ethnic food, cafeteria food, restaurant food, airplane food, and the “food” you buy to snack on at a movie theater. In addition, we all have different thoughts about what we like to put on our food like salt, ketchup, red pepper, barbeque sauce, steak sauce, sauerkraut and so on.
Our series of articles titled, Hungry For
Russian Translation, focuses on food. The topic of the series is food, however, we offer a wide variety of language-related instructional activities. One article may give information about verbs, another may discuss vocabulary and the next may be about writing a topic. Sometimes only a word game will be added-something that will make students pay attention to the languages they study.
A large part of the activities in our series of writings include games and encourage creativity. It is intentional - in my opinion language games play an essential part in building language skills. Students need to get interested in words and their quirkiness, changeability and power. English teachers need to do all they can to turn kids on to language. Play has power.
Although the idea to create this series of articles was mine, I was not the only one to work on it. Actually, my contribution was only a small part of the effort that was put in making it possible. Sarah Von Seggern, a
German Translation worker and Michael Antipov, a Russian Translation professional, worked alongside me and assisted in so many ways—writing, proofreading, fact-checking, you name it. Here I have to mention and to thank to Pedro Moreno, a Spanish Translation professional, who also lend assistance to me in many ways. I will be happy if you like Translation Is Ready and it turns out to be helpful you in your translation teachings.
What do you and your students share when talking about food in class? Do you talk about a time when you wanted badly to make a special meal but everything went wrong? Do you enjoy thinking about the memories of your great-grandmother making homemade ravioli? Did a family member has had an amusing experience in a restaurant? Do you make jokes about the food made by a relative which all of you hated because of its awful taste?
In the first task, we encourage you to write a story about food. If you need some help thinking of one you may ask your classmates, friends and instructors to make suggestions. If you can't think of anything at all, write about anything you remember and is related to food - maybe a special occasion where food was served, or special meal.
