Mastery through Translation>
If you read a foreign language, whether laboriously or with ease, you
should make this power assist you to amass a good English vocabulary.
Take compositions or parts of compositions written in the foreign tongue,
and turn them into idiomatic English. How much you should translate
at a given time depends upon your leisure and your adeptness. Employ all
the methods--the spontaneous, the carefully perfected, the oral, the
written--heretofore explained in this chapter. In your final work on a
passage you should aim at a faultless rendition, and should spend time and
ransack the lexicons rather than come short of this ideal.
The habit of translation is an excellent habit to keep up. For the study
of an alien tongue not only improves your English, but has compensations
in itself.
EXERCISE - Translation
1. Translate from any accessible book in the foreign language you can
read.
2. Subscribe for a period of at least two or three months for a newspaper
or magazine in that language, if it is a modern one. Translate as before,
but give most of your time to rapid oral translation for a real or
imaginary American hearer.
3.
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