Popular Fun Activities

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 nationalities and cultures are familiar with the subject. Regardless of the nationality and the mother tongue of the person, everyone whose activity is related to translation, whether a beginner or an expert, have their own opinion on it. That is because all of us are emotionally related to 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 enjoy talking about borscht, German Translation workers are proud of their sausage, and Medical Translation workers just want us all to eat healthy. In addition, all translation workers prefer one particular style of food or other such as fast food, junk food, cafeteria food, ethnic food, restaurant food, and the snacks and popcorn you munch 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 say something about verbs, another may deal with vocabulary, and the next may be about a writing topic. Some days, only a word game will fill the bill—something that will wake students up to paying attention to the languages they study.

A large part of the activities in our series of writings include games and encourage creativity. The reason is that in my opinion language games have a crucial role in building language skills. Students need to become aware of the quirkiness, versatility and power of words. English teachers have to do their best to get children involved in language. Play is a powerful tool to do so.

Althought the idea to write this series of articles was mine, I was not the only one to contribute to it. What I did was only a small part of the effort that went into making it possible. It was created with the help of Sarah Von Seggern, a German Translation professional and Michael Antipov, a Russian Translation worker, who gave assistance to me in so many ways – content development, proofreading, fact-checking and many other. Another professional, Roberto Garcia, who works in the field of Spanish Translation, also assisted in a variety of ways. I hope you enjoy The Translation Is Ready and find it useful in your translation teachings.

What stories about food are discussed in your classroom? Do you talk about a time when everything went wrong while you were making a special meal? Do you relish remembering the great homemade ravioli of your great-grandmother? Did something funny happen to a family member in a restaurant? Do you have your little jokes about how you all hated to eat the food, prepared by a relative because it tasted terrible?

In the first assignment, you are asked to write about a story relating to food. Talk to classmates, friends and instructors if you need some help thinking of one. If you still find it difficult, share any kind of memory you have relating to food – maybe a special meal, or a special occasion.

Filed under: Hobbies on March 18th, 2010