Understand spoken language

Make sure the student could translate in each direction

Submitted by admin on 20 August 2020

You should try and make sure that the student could have a reasonable chance to get a correct translation in either direction.

For example, the following would not be a good English and Dutch entry:

EN: Do you have anything bigger?
NL: Heeft u een grotere kamer? (literally: Do you have a bigger room?)

Why would these be bad?

You need to remember that the student could be asked a question with either language as the prompt. That is, they could be prompted with the English and asked to say what the Dutch should be, or they could be prompted with the the Dutch and asked what the English would be. Imagine that the student was prompted with the English "Do you have anything bigger?". They would not know from the context to include the word for a room.

Much better would be to have both the English and the Dutch explicitly include the word for room:

EN: Do you have a bigger room?
NL: Heeft u een grotere kamer?

or  both the English and the Dutch leave it ambigous what is being talked about (maybe a bigger room, or a bigger pair of trousers, who knows):

EN: Do you have anything bigger?
NL: Heeft u iets groter?

The question you should always ask is: is it possible to get the correct translation without any context other than just this phrase?