Should You Translate While Reading?

Nobody decides to translate while reading. It happens on its own: the eye takes in a sentence in the foreign language, and half a beat later a voice somewhere behind it produces an English version, phrase by phrase. The question is not really whether to permit this — early on you could not stop it if you wanted to — but what it costs, which parts of it are worth keeping, and what makes it loosen its grip.

Three habits with one name

Most arguments about translation are people talking past each other, because the word covers three different things.

• Looking a word up. You meet an unknown word, you find out what it means, you carry on. This is a lookup, not a translation, and it is not what anyone is warning you about.
• Glossing a sentence. A sentence resists, so you take it apart deliberately and build an English version of it to check that you have understood. Occasional, conscious, and often the right move.
• Running translation. Every sentence goes through English on its way in, whether it needed to or not. This is the habit worth talking about, because it is invisible from the inside — it feels like reading.

Your first language is never switched off

It is worth getting the mechanism roughly right, because the folk version of it produces a lot of pointless guilt.

The standard picture in the research on bilingual memory is that a second-language word starts life attached to its first-language equivalent, and that the direct link between the foreign word and the concept strengthens with proficiency and use. A beginner meeting стол goes through “table” to reach the thing; a reader with a few hundred hours behind them increasingly does not. What changes is not that the first language is deleted — it stays available, and any bilingual can be shown to activate it even when it is irrelevant — but that it stops being on the critical path.

So translating early is not a bad habit you picked up. It is what the connection looks like before use has worn a shorter route. The practical consequence is that you cannot fix it by resolving to stop. You fix it by reading in the conditions under which the shorter route gets used.

What running translation actually costs

Three things, in rising order of importance.

Speed. Translating is a slower operation than understanding, and it does not run in the background: it competes for the same attention. A reader who translates everything is working at a fraction of the rate they could manage, which matters because volume is where acquisition comes from.

Working memory. A sentence has to be held while it is being resolved. If part of the capacity is spent composing an English version, less is left for the sentence itself, and by the end of a long paragraph you have a pile of accurate fragments and no idea what the paragraph said. The reader who complains of understanding every word and missing the point is usually describing this.

What gets stored. This is the real cost. If the foreign sentence is only ever a waypoint on the road to an English one, the thing that goes into memory is the English. The word order, the collocations, the case ending that made the sentence mean what it meant — the whole pattern — gets discarded at the door. You end up having read a great deal of English derived from a foreign source, which is a respectable activity and not the one that builds a language.

There is also a mechanical objection in languages that do not line up with English. Russian permits an order that English cannot copy, and German makes you wait for the verb; a running translation stalls until the sentence has finished delivering its parts, while a reader who takes the sentence on its own terms does not have to wait. The habit is most expensive exactly where the languages are least alike.

When translating is the right thing to do

None of that makes translation a sin. Used deliberately, on a small scale, it does jobs nothing else does.

• As a check. Comprehension is a feeling and feelings are unreliable. Rendering one paragraph in English at the end of a chapter is the cheapest way to find out whether you actually understood it or only recognised the words.
• On a sentence that has beaten you twice. A construction that keeps collapsing is worth taking apart explicitly — subject, verb, what governs what — and an English version is the natural place to write the result down. This belongs to the close, slow pass over a text rather than to reading proper, and it is one of the legitimate uses of intensive reading.
• For a phrase that will not stick. Writing an idiom out with its English on the other side of the card is ordinary vocabulary work, and it is not in conflict with reading as long as it stays small.
• Because you want to. Translating literature is an old and serious pleasure. If you enjoy it, do it — just do not confuse it with your reading hours.

Parallel texts, and how they go wrong

Bilingual editions with the original on the left and the translation on the right are sold as the solution to this problem, and used carelessly they are the fastest way to entrench it. The eye is lazy and the English column is effortless; after a few pages most readers are reading the translation and glancing at the original, which produces the sensation of a productive evening and nothing else.

What makes them work is a rule about order and distance:

• Foreign side first, always, and a whole unit at a time. A scene, a chapter, at minimum a page. Then the English, then — this is the part people skip — back to the foreign side once more, now that you know what it says.
• Never alternate sentence by sentence. Line-by-line interleaving removes every reason to work out the sentence, because the answer is already in view.
• Cover the column. A sheet of paper is a serious tool here.
• Better still, separate them in time. Read a translation of the whole book first, or a book you already know well, then read the original with no crutch at all. You get the support of knowing what happens without the temptation of a facing page — and knowing the plot is one of the standard ways of making a hard text readable.

Footnotes and glossaries are a different animal, and the difference is the return trip. A gloss at the foot of the page answers one word in a second and puts you back in the sentence you were in. A facing translation answers the whole page and gives you no reason to return. That is why our own books gloss at the foot of the page and do not print a facing version.

How the habit fades

It fades under three conditions, and they are all conditions of the reading rather than resolutions about it.

• The text is easy enough. Translation is what the mind falls back on when direct comprehension fails. On a page where nearly everything is familiar there is nothing for it to do, and it goes quiet by itself. This is the strongest argument for reading below your ceiling rather than at it — and it depends on how much of the page you know.
• There is some pressure on the clock. Running translation cannot survive at speed. Reading a set number of pages before the tea goes cold, or following an audiobook that will not wait, forces the shortcut into use. Anything that makes stopping inconvenient works.
• You have read the passage before. On a second pass the sentences are already resolved, so the mind has no excuse to build an English version, and it gets a rehearsal of what direct reading feels like. This is one of the quieter benefits of rereading.

Two smaller things help. Dialogue translates itself less than description does, because it is short, situational and predictable. And not stopping at unknown words — reading to the end of the sentence before deciding anything — starves the habit of its usual trigger, which is the reflex that stops the page.

A test

At the end of a page, ask yourself what just happened in the story and answer it silently. If the answer arrives as a summary of events, you are reading. If it arrives as an English sentence you have to compose from the foreign one you are still holding, you are translating. Do the test occasionally, over months, on the same kind of text. It moves.

Do not extend the test to thinking in the language. That is a separate skill, it belongs to production rather than to reading, and readers who are perfectly free of running translation still think about their shopping in English.

How much of a page you need to know before direct reading becomes possible at all is a question with numbers attached, and the mechanism underneath all of this is comprehensible input itself.