So much for the reading selections—now for the way in which they ought to be used in the classroom. I have a very vivid recollection of how most of the language lessons were conducted when I went to school, and I have a suspicion that this method of procedure has not yet quite died out, even if in many places it has more or less felt the influence of the law of change. First the “old lesson” is gone through, and that must take as little time as possible, therefore the pupil is required to be able to translate it fluently without reading it aloud first. Then we come to the “new lesson.” A boy stands up and reads a little piece out of the reader—stuttering; the words are separated from each other by pauses and various unaesthetic hm- and er- sounds, and sometimes by the teacher’s corrections, or “now hurry,” “what a terrible pronunciation!” “how do you pronounce g before e? well, you know that just as well as I do, you blockhead,” etc. All that the boy thinks about, whenever he gets an opportunity, is, what in the world can be the meaning of that word I am coming to. Then he translates, interrupted by the teacher’s corrections, or “look out,” “where is the verb,” “but what case is it,” etc. Then there are, perhaps, some grammatical questions; he is to give the principal parts of a verb or two, explain the use of a subjunctive, etc.; the questions are not asked in the foreign language and are not to be answered in that tongue. The next boy is called upon to recite in the same way, and so on until the lesson has been gone through; if there is time enough, perhaps we go through it once more, but that must be in a hurry, so we do not stop to read it first this time. The last five or six minutes are devoted to looking through the lesson for next time; the teacher translates it while the pupils follow it in their books, and perhaps exert themselves to write down the meaning of some difficult word in the margin of the reader or in a note-book.

The most prominent feature of the teaching is haste; there is much to be done, especially as examination draws on. It seems to be an established custom that the examination marks are determined by the quality of the translation, and it is in order to get practice in translating that the reading selections are gone through as many times as possible. There is not much time for reading aloud; why, when one has only learned the main principles of pronunciation, one can generally infer the pronunciation of any word from the spelling, especially in German, but also in French. I suppose it is more or less in this confidence that the teachers let a piece be translated three or four times for every time it is read aloud in the original.

How much of the foreign language does the pupil hear in the course of such a lesson? The teacher says a word now and then—for instance, when a pupil translates incorrectly; but then the attention is not directed to the pronunciation; besides, it is generally only one word that he says, and that word occurs most likely in a sentence in the pupils’ own language. Now, it is a matter of fact that even one who pronounces very well cannot get the proper French swing of a French word when it occurs in company with words of another language. The basis of articulation is different in the two languages, and it is not easy to shift from the one to the other in a moment. So it is but little that the pupil hears from his teacher. From his classmates he hears a little more, no doubt; but theirs is not exactly exemplary pronunciation, and besides, it does not interest him to pay attention to it. If he only can manage to keep the place in the book where the others are for the moment, he can very well think about other things while the others are reciting; he can, for instance, review the difficult words in the next piece, if he does not prefer to dream about his stamp collection or his bicycle. Finally, on rare occasions, he is permitted to read a couple of lines aloud in class, but it is considered merely as a sort of introduction to the main business in hand, translation. He never gets an opportunity to say anything himself in the foreign language outside of what stands in the book, and he very seldom hears others say anything that he is not following in print.

So it is no wonder that such instruction scarcely cultivates at all the pupil’s ability to understand a foreign language as it is rapidly and naturally spoken by a native. If he should hear the simplest every-day sentence in a foreign language, correctly and naturally pronounced, and he should be asked merely to repeat it, he would in nine cases out of ten betray the strangest perplexity, although he would have had no trouble whatever with a far more difficult piece which he happened to meet with in print.

But that is not all; this method has other disadvantages. The foreign words gallop past the pupil’s eye; his main object is to be able to recognize them in a vague sort of way so that they may give him the clue to the translation. Oftentimes one word thus vaguely remembered even gives him the clue to the translation of a whole sentence which he knows by heart because there was something special about it. What he gets hold of is the translation, and the whole translation often comes to his mind when he has only looked at the beginning of the sentence in the original—sometimes, however, only on condition that it stands in the same place on the page (at the top to the left, etc.), where he is used to seeing it. There is not the same inducement to remember the forms of the foreign expressions exactly. If you take a clever boy who has been taught according to the usual method and, after he has translated a little piece of his lesson, close his book and ask him to give the original of the last sentence which he has translated, it will in many cases be impossible for him to do it. I reported an example of this at the congress in Stockholm in 1886; a clever pupil was translating a piece of MÉrimÉe’s Colomba at sight, and was doing it very well, when I made the experiment. He apparently remembered the sentence well enough in the translation, but it was slowly and with difficulty that he ventured the French: Et il pleurait comme le fils de Pietri pleurait. But in the book there stood: Et il pleura comme pleurait le fils de Pietri. It is clear that it is impossible for a pupil to get a correct conception of the radical difference between passÉ dÉfini and imparfait, or of the effect of the order of words, when he pays so little attention to the French forms that he meets with. One can never get any real appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of a foreign language as long as the translation is the main object.

Let us consider for a moment the workings of a boy’s mind when it is his turn to recite and he has to translate such a sentence as, for instance: cet homme, dont elle ne voyait jamais les enfants. Cet, this, homme, man, dont, whose—now he discovers that it will not be English if he continues to take one word after the other in the French order, so he looks ahead, tries every word hurriedly; finally he finds les enfants, the children; no, I forgot, we must not have the article there in English, so merely children; back to elle, she; now he sees that ne jamais must be taken first: never; voyait, saw. So instead of taking the French words in the natural order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, he has to skip backwards and forwards in order to get them in the order 1, 2, 3, (8), 9, 4, 5, 7, 6. In an English text-book for German schools the following sentence[5] is given for translation with numbers indicating the order in which the words are to be taken in English: ¹WÜrden ²Sie ³nicht ⁶viel ⁷zeit ⁵gehabt ⁴haben ⁸wenn ⁹Sie ¹¹nicht ¹⁵jenen ¹⁶brief ¹³zu ¹⁴schreiben ¹²gehabt ¹⁰hÄtten. In other cases, it is the pupils themselves who by means of numbers and letters (“paving letters”) smooth the difficulty of translation. Anyone who is accustomed to translate German at sight knows how when he has translated the subject of a dependent clause he silently runs through what follows, often several lines, in order to find the verb, which according to English usage must not be too far separated from its subject, and how in hastily trying each single word his attention is drawn to a number of subordinate thoughts while the main thought stands and waits, as it were. This mental process is made even more complicated by the fact that only in a minority of cases does every word in a sentence (like the simple sentence given above) in any way correspond to an English word; as a rule the translator also has to think about such questions as, does sich here mean him, or her, or himself, or herself, or itself, or oneself; does si mean so, or as, or if; is il fait to be taken as he does, he makes, he has (something done), or it does, or it is, or in still another way, etc., etc. This mental process, which is much more complicated than would generally be supposed, is far beyond the ability of the children. Therefore they often remain contented with the text-book’s, the teacher’s or the parent’s translation, which is learned partly or entirely by heart; otherwise the translation is apt to swarm with the well-known offences against the mother-tongue, word-formations, phrases, expressions, order of words, etc., which are not English. Since the teacher of course cannot put up with this murdering of the King’s English, a large part of every lesson in the foreign language has to be spent in the troublesome task of rooting out these barbarisms.

That is why it is so often said that instruction in foreign languages always is, or ought to be, at the same time instruction in one’s native language, or, as the matter is sometimes more pointedly put, that the main object in learning other languages is to get a correct knowledge of one’s own. Of course there is much truth in this last statement, if it is the theoretical understanding of languages that we are thinking about; for it is only natural that we cannot appreciate the richness of our mother-tongue, or have any opinion about its structural advantages or disadvantages, or even give a correct description of its structure or understand its historical development, when we have no other languages to compare it with.[6] Yet all this ought not to close our eyes to the fact that as soon as it is a question of the practical command of the mother-tongue, the assertion is utterly false. In this respect instruction in foreign languages does not help us, and it is not the people who are most accomplished in other languages who are the best stylists in their own. On the contrary! Only compare the language used by the same pupil in his English essays and in his translations from the Latin; in the latter, you will find a number of offences against good English usage which could not possibly have occurred in the former. So the errors are in reality not due to a deficient command of the mother-tongue, but solely and alone to the restraining and confusing influence brought to bear upon the pupil’s thoughts by the foreign forms of expression; the strange language lures him in upon linguistic paths where he would never set his foot otherwise, and which only lead him into a mire. It is the school with its translation-method that has sown the dragon’s teeth, and it must now reap the consequences. Instruction in foreign languages, according to the prevailing method, is so far from being a help to the pupils in their treatment of English, that, on the contrary, in spite of all the energy which is put in on combating Germanisms, Latinisms, etc., in the translations, it often makes them uncertain and vacillating in their feeling for what is good English.[7]

The acquirement of a certain intuition for good usage in a foreign language had best be left out of the discussion here; a really thorough knowledge of French or German habits of expression is, of course, not to be obtained as long as we are unable to see anything in these languages without straightway turning all our attention to something quite different, namely, the English rendering.[8] We get no further than to a “nodding acquaintance” with the component parts of the foreign language, so that we know them pretty well by sight and can repeat their names, but we do not become quite intimate with them, we do not live together with them, they do not become flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood. If something difficult is to be learned, the very first essential is to be much occupied with it; therefore the first condition for good instruction in foreign languages would seem to be to give the pupil as much as possible to do with and in the foreign language; he must be steeped in it, not only get a sprinkling of it now and then; he must be ducked down in it and get to feel as if he were in his own element, so that he may at last disport himself in it as an able swimmer. But what is most characteristic for the prevailing methods is that the translation with its accessories swallows up so much time, that there is none left for this free disporting in the foreign element.

Then why does translation play such an important part? We must first find an answer to this question before we proceed to ask if it can and ought to be thrust into the background, and by what means. Now the ability to translate may either be considered the end of instruction in foreign languages, or translation may be regarded merely as a means of instruction (one of several means or perhaps the only means).

Now is it right to say that the purpose of instruction in a foreign language is that the pupils may learn to translate fluently and exactly (from and into the language)? The answer must be an emphatic No. The popular opinion among those who have not thought the matter over, or who have not given sufficiently careful attention to their own mental processes, is that a foreign language can be understood only by transposing it into one’s mother-tongue; but this is not so. Those who read foreign authors in the original with real advantage do not actually first translate each word, still less each sentence or each period, into English before they proceed further. Those who are listening to a French lecture or seeing a play in Paris have no time to translate to themselves, but it is not necessary for them to do it either. And finally, it goes without saying that the Englishman who really speaks French and German well does not first construct his sentences in English and then translate them in the same way as a schoolboy translates his exercises. No; in all these mental processes, English occupies a place in the background and is just as superfluous as for instance German is for me while I am reading or talking French. How often are we not asked the meaning of some foreign word or expression which we know very well and would neither pay any special attention to in a book nor hesitate to use in conversation but yet we cannot give any English equivalent for it without resorting to some vague uncertain circumlocution; then suddenly, after a good deal of speculation, we hit upon the correct English expression. Or the questioner may suggest first one and then another translation of something French or Latin; we do not feel satisfied, but cannot mention anything better; then he attempts a new suggestion and instantly it flashes upon us that this is the best. In all these cases, then, we have clearly and distinctly understood the foreign expressions without being able to translate them (or before we could translate them). Of course the German word fall is only one and the same word for me whether it be used in such a manner as to be best rendered by English case, instance, or by fall, decline, descent, or in still another way (unglÜcksfall, accident; schlimmsten falles, if the worst come to the worst; auf keinen fall, on no account, etc.). When I come across the word gegen, I do not consciously stop to decide if it “means” towards, to, about or against; nor in the case of bleiben, if it is to be rendered by remain, stay, stop, continue, keep, or survive. Il a dÛ se taire; elle a le coeur serrÉ; il traite le sujet avec la compÉtence qu’on lui connaÎt—should I really have to hunt for the proper translation every time such an idiom occurs? Should I stop at every perspicuous German compound until I had found the cumbersome English circumlocution that is often needed to render it? No; in all of these cases, I directly and spontaneously connect the idea with the language in which it is expressed without going any roundabout way through the words of my native language. Any one who introduces a foreign word into his English either because there is no exact equivalent in English or, at least, because he cannot recall it for the moment, also thereby shows that people really can, and very frequently do, learn words in other languages without getting at their meaning through their mother-tongue.

“Il trouva la pauvre fille dans un État À faire pitiÉ.” “On a voulu trouver dans ses oeuvres un pessimisme de parti pris.” “Pour lui, il y allait de la gloire de cette maison qu’il servait depuis sa jeunesse.” How many a man will understand without difficulty such sentences as these and a hundred others, and yet hesitate at once when asked to translate them! We must on the whole make a distinction between the ability to feel at home in a language and skill in translating from or into it; even if these two accomplishments may be found in one and the same person, yet they are not seldom to be seen separated. If I may be allowed to talk about myself, I may say that my ability to translate quickly and well is so decidedly inferior to my ability to understand and to express my thoughts in those languages which I have studied, that I should scarcely like to have my linguistic attainments judged by my skill in translation.

The lately deceased art-critic, P. G. Hamerton, the author of that interesting book French and English, says about himself: “As my wife was a Parisian with a strong taste for the classical literature of her own country, I became her pupil in French and she became mine in English. We made it a rule in our private conversation never to allow a fault in either language to pass uncorrected, and we read aloud to each other a great deal.... In the use of languages I have one faculty which seems to be rather uncommon: that of keeping them entirely separated. When speaking or writing French I am, for the time being, like one totally ignorant of English, as English words do not occur to me, and I never translate anything, not even weights and measures, or money, or the thermometer, from one language to the other, but think in each, independently.”

When Hamerton here says that this ability is unusual, he no doubt means that it is unusual in so high a degree as he had it. Perhaps it is not all people who get so far that dix-huit degrÉs, for instance, awakens in them just as precise a conception as the corresponding degrees of heat in terms of Fahrenheit; and yet, no doubt, by habit, this too will become quite natural for those who care very much to have the temperature expressed in degrees. It is just like the foreigner in France who, after a very short time, involuntarily begins to calculate with French money, so that he does not have to transpose deux francs cinquante into English shillings and pence before he can judge as to whether the price of an article is high or low.

Though I may admit, however, that this ability to feel at home in a strange language is not altogether common in so high a degree, yet I think it may be said that the same ability only in a less degree is not unusual. I mean that it is rather the exception than the rule for people who read foreign books to any extent at all to have to translate to themselves in order to understand what they are reading, with the exception, perhaps, of some difficult lines here and there. And even in the difficult places, where they have to resort to their mother-tongue in order to understand the meaning, it is generally only one or two words which have to be looked up, so they generally do not even pause to translate the whole clause in which those words have occurred; still less frequently do they stop merely to untangle some involved sentence construction. When a whole population has to make constant use of two languages, the circumstances are no doubt always the same as among the Wends in Lusatia: “They speak both Wendish and German with equal fluency; yet the common people generally refuse when they are asked to translate something from one language to another: ‘he cannot do it,’ or, as one of my informants expressed himself, ‘he is afraid to.’ He can, however, without difficulty repeat in German a tale which he has heard in Wendish, and vice versÂ, and likewise he can give the exact translation of single words.”[9]

While there are countless persons who have use for the ability to understand a foreign language directly, and while there is at all events a constantly increasing number of people who need to express their thoughts in a foreign language, there are really very few who will ever have any occasion to exercise skill in translation. There are many who write private letters in German, etc., but they do not compose an English text first which they then proceed to translate with exactness. Even those who have foreign business letters to write for someone else are not generally given every word that is to stand in them, but merely a rough draft of the contents, which they are to clothe in a foreign language as best they can. There remain, then, the few translators connected with the law-courts, the providers of translated novels, and finally the very small number of choice spirits who have the courage to grapple with the valuable and charming art of transplanting poetry in a poetical rendering. But they may all find comfort in the fact that skill in translation at the very bottom rests on that same direct command of language that we all need,[10] so there is no need for them to feel dissatisfied if we refuse to recognize skill in translation as the end and aim of all instruction in languages.

Our ideal must rather be the nearest possible approach to the native’s command of the language, so that the words and sentences may awaken the same ideas in us as in the native—and these ideas, as we well know, are not the same as those called forth by the corresponding words in our own language. The relations between languages are not like the relations between mathematical equivalents; coeur, herz, heart do not all cover the same ground, to say nothing of the difference between sens, sinn, sense, etc. Even when the literal meaning may be said to be the same, the suggestions associated with the words vary in the different languages, suggestions arising from related words, from words that are similar in sound or similar in some other way, from frequent combinations in which the words occur, etc. The same animal is in English called bat, in French chauvesouris, in German fledermaus, in Latin vespertilio, in Danish flagermus, but what a difference in the suggestions! The French, the German and the Danish words call attention to the animal’s resemblance to a mouse, the Danish word besides to its flapping movement (a suggestion which must be lost for the Germans since flattern has taken the place of fledern), but the French word to its bald appearance; the Latin word makes us think of the time of day when the animal is abroad, but the English word bat is rather an abstract expression without any suggestiveness, and we can understand why Tennyson declared that the provincial word flittermouse was far more suitable for poetical use than bat. These “undertones” of the words sound more distinctly in puns, rhymes, etc., but still they always lie lurking in the background of our conscience. It is all such things as these, together with the fact that some languages carefully distinguish between certain shades of grammar or meaning which are of no consequence in other languages, where the finesses seem to be extended to totally different points, and furthermore together with different habits as to order of words, etc., etc., which, taken all in all, make it impossible for any translation ever to be a perfect reproduction of the original: traduttore traditore!

For all these reasons, it is not translation (or skill in translation) that we are aiming at in teaching foreign languages.