Vertalen en Begrijpen

In view of the difference of opinion as to what the translation may and should test, it seemed useful to find out what in fact pupils are doing when they are making a translation. For this purpose I interviewed ten pupils of 3 more or less random schools in the week after their final exam. I presented them with a Latin text, which was about half the length of the text in the exam, though comparable as far as degree of difficulty was concerned. They were asked to translate it in the usual manner, the only difference being that they need not write down the result. Everything they were thinking had to be said aloud and was recorded. From these data I concluded that the translation only calls for minimal comprehension and that the degree to which the knowlegde of the language is demonstrably used is sometimes less high than is often supposed. Knowledge of vocabulary plays a very important role because in principle the pupil builds up his translation on the basis of the words that he knows or has looked up. Where the order of the words in the foreign language and the mother language correspond, a correct translation may occur without an apparent effort to understand the structure of the foreign language. The procedure of concurrent verbalisation does not clarify the nature of the processes involved. To find this out a combination of thinking aloud and 'probes' in a less naturalistic setting would seem necessary.