A busman's holiday!
Every time I went on holiday to a French or Spanish-speaking country during my 20-year teaching career, I would inevitably return home loaded down with any type of ‘realia’ which could conceivably be used to add a touch of authenticity to my lessons.
Restaurant menus, train timetables, food wrappers, magazines, books (even, on one occasion, a mail-order catalogue), records, cassettes, CDs, DVDs (all of this, of course, before such resources became easily available via the Internet), all found their way into my suitcase.
Fast forward to autumn 2024. Now a translator, I found myself in Belgium for the ITI Walking Weekend in Bouillon and a few days visiting historic towns and cities in southern Belgium and northern France.
I may not have been surreptitiously sliding menus into my bag or saving all my chocolate wrappers anymore, but I found that I was still very alert to the language around me, this time through the eyes of a translator – criticising translations I encountered or looking at signs and notices or watching TV and thinking ‘how would I translate that?’
Such opportunities to visit our source language countries, practice our oral skills and further our knowledge of their culture and heritage are priceless. Once a linguist, always a linguist, eh?
Janice Crossfield
October 2024
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