Crafting with Kids

We all know how important food is to every human being, so it is natural to attract the interest of students involved in translation studies programs.That is because people from all backgrounds and cultures feel strongly about this issue. Regardless of the nationality and the mother tongue of the person, everyone whose activity is related to translation, whether a beginner or an expert, have their own opinion on it. That is because food can provoke highly emotional thoughts. An indispensable part of our lives, good food also is a material component of various events such as national holidays, religious celebrations, birthday parties, wedding receptions, and gatherings with friends and neighbors.

All translation students and professionals have opinions about food and just about everything related to it. While Russian Translation Professionals like talking about borscht, German Translation workers boast about the qualities of their sausages and Medical Translation workers just ask us to eat healthy. In addition, all translation workers prefer one particular style of food or other such as fast food, junk food, cafeteria food, ethnic food, restaurant food, and the snacks and popcorn you munch at a movie theater. Moreover, all of us have different preferences about what we like to put on our food like salt, ketchup, red pepper, various kinds of sauces, sauerkraut and so on.

Our series of articles titled, Hungry For Russian Translation, focuses on food. The topic of the series is food, however, we offer a wide variety of language-related instructional activities. One article may say something about verbs, another may deal with vocabulary, and the next may be about a writing topic. Sometimes we may offer only a word game – something that will focus on the languages the students study.

Many of the activities in our series of writings involve games and creativity. That’s because I think playing with language is so crucial to building language skills. Students need to become aware of the quirkiness, versatility and power of words. English teachers have to do their best to get children involved in language. Play is a powerful tool 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 to English 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. Here I have to mention and to thank to Pedro Moreno, a Spanish Translation professional, who also lend assistance to me in many ways. I will be happy if you like Translation Is Ready and it turns out to be helpful you in your translation teachings.

How are your discussions about food held when in class? Do you talk about a time when you wanted badly to make a special meal but everything went wrong? Do you relish remembering the great homemade ravioli of your great-grandmother? Did a humorous event take place to a family member in a restaurant? Do you have your little jokes about how you all hated to eat the food, prepared by a relative because it tasted terrible?

In the first task, we encourage you to write a story about food. If you need some help thinking of one you may ask your classmates, friends and instructors to make suggestions. 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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