While the following does not quite fit the criteria for my “word-for-word” (mis)translations, I thought it such vividly morbid stream-of-consciousness that I dug it up from the archives.
On the eve of Halloween, I asked my writing class to frighten me with a descriptive paragraph about a haunted house. After reading out the submissions by flashlight [...]
Archive for December, 2008
Word for Word pt.2
Posted in Word for Word, tagged Aesop, Education, English, Engrish, ESL, Fariy Tales, Hagwon, South Korea, The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, translation on December 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
According to Aesop, there was once a
goose that laid golden eggs. Of course, the farmer, who quite happily collected the droplets of pure gold, became rapidly rich and even more rapidly greedy. Not content to wait through the gestation of gold, he decided to kill the goose in order to harvest, in full, its precious [...]
Something’s amiss in English Hagwonlandia
Posted in South Korea, tagged Education, Hagwon, lesson plans, mid-term exams, South Korea on December 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
That my English Hagwon (academy) caters to the incessant demands of our students’ mothers has always been a no-brainer observation. Within my first month, my weekly lesson plans, which are distributed to each student, were suddenly rejected for not containing “enough detail.” The lesson plans themselves were not inadequate. I simply needed to expand on [...]
Word for Word pt. 1
Posted in Word for Word, tagged English, ESL, homework, inventions, Korean, South Korea, translation on December 3, 2008 | 2 Comments »
When learning a foreign language, the real challenge is to begin thinking within the language itself. Prior to anything approximating fluency, the tendency is always to translate word for word from your native language. I remember well my French teachers in grade school bemoaning the inherent English-ness of my written passages.
In Korea, the challenge is [...]
