Word-for-word translation: an activity with possibilities
Generally speaking, teachers discourage word-for-word translation from a students own language into the language they are learning. Sometimes they discourage it for the wrong reason – that translation or the use of L1 is just wrong. Sometimes teachers discourage it because they know it’ll end up in gobbledygook and they teach students that the correct approach is to translate whole phrases or collocations. On the whole, I agree with this second view. If students are looking up an unknown word from L2 text on Goggle translate (or similar), then it’s generally a good idea to include other...
