Being an essential component to life, food as a subject attracts the interest of students in translation studies programs.That’s because it is a subject that is familiar to all nationalities and cultures. Regardless of his or her native language, everyone involved in translation, from beginning students to experienced translation workers, have their own opinion on it. That is because all of us are emotionally related to food. It is not only an important part of our lives, it also plays an important role in celebrations such as national holidays, religious celebrations, birthday parties, wedding receptions, and gatherings with friends and neighbours.

All translation students and professionals have opinions about food and just about everything related to it. While Russian Translation workers are proud of their borsch, German Translation professionals take pride in their sausage and Medical Translation workers just advise us to eat healthy. Besides, every translator worker has his or her own preference as regards a particular style of food such as fast food, junk food, cafeteria food, ethnic food, restaurant food, and the snacks you buy to munch at a movie theater. Moreover, we all have our own preferences regarding the spices and side dishes we usually consume our food with.

In our series of articles titled, The Russian Translation Is Ready, food is the focal point of our activities. The topic of the series is food, however, we offer a wide variety of language-related instructional activities. In one article we might be providing a quick lesson on verbs, the next for something on vocabulary, and the next for a writing topic. Sometimes only a word game will be added-something that will make students pay attention to the languages they study.

Many of the activities in our series of writings involve games and creativity. The reason is that in my opinion language games have a crucial role in building language skills. Students need to get interested in words and their quirkiness, changeability and power. The task of English teachers is to get kids involved in language. Play is a powerful means to do so.

Althought the idea to write this series of articles was mine, I was not the only one to contribute to it. In fact, I was only a small part of the effort that went into making it this 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. Thank you also goes to Jennifer Martinez, a Spanish Translation professional who also assisted in a variety of ways. I hope you will find this series of articles enjoyable and it will be useful in your translation sessions.

What are the stories about food you discuss in your classroom? Do you discuss a time when you were unsuccessful in preparing a special meal? Do you relish remembering the great homemade ravioli of your great-grandmother? Did a humorous event take place to a family member while eating out? Do you laugh at how you all hated to eat the food that a relative made because it tasted terrible?

Your first assignment is to write a story related to food. Talk to classmates, friends and instructors if you need some help thinking of one. If you can’t think of anything at all, share any kind of memory you have of an occasion that involved food—maybe a special birthday meal.

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Filed under: Recreation and Sports

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