The+contribution+of+the+TEFL+496+course+to+your+professional+development+as+a+prospective+teacher

This is the second translation course in my teaching experience. the previous translation course was English to Turkish, so it was much easier because it is always like that. However, in this translation course I had learned much more thing because it is harder and requires much effort. Throughout four year program we had little chance to translate articles but thanks to this course we translated many articles. I think that this course is very beneficial in terms of offering different types of translation techniques and coping with difficult sentences structures. Because of that, I think most students in this Foreign Language Department should take much more translation course. It is substantial that each student have chance to learn different areas and translate spoken and written texts.

Thanks to this course, I realized how important the culture of a country while translating. I had an opportunity to study different academic articles and deal with different structures. Although I was experienced enough in translating from English to Turkish, it was very effective for me to translate from Turkish to Turkish. In fact, this course contributed me to learn different idioms, colloquials, verbs and proverbs. In the class hours we made some of our works and dealt with them at home and have chance to revise and rewrite them. It was good to check and see our mistakes together because we tried to find best option while doing together. We translated our works considering the culture, norms and loyalty to target language. I think this course contributed me to improve my vocabulary knowledge and sentence structure both in Turkish and English. I learned that being loyalty in translation is very important to provide exact message. The articles, we had responsible for this course were very effective. I learned different theories from the class discussion and had chance to answer lots of questions in my mind. I think as a class we had fun while presenting and listening the others. I looked many issues from different perspectives. In class discussion, we shared our thoughts and opinions about the articles.

In class we had chance to have guests in our class, I liked especially Gulden Hoca was very effective because we practiced spontaneous translation. I tried to translate the speech of Abdullah Gul. It was really hard to keep up with his speech but thanks to this experience I understand one more time how difficult is to be a translator. It is not as most of us think. In our culture, if you a student in Foreign Department, it means you have potential to be translator. However, it is not such an easy task. She gave us different translation of a poem and we examined in a detailed way together. It helped us to see difference between word for word translation and sense for sense. Our other guest from Cankaya University, Bulent Akant shared his book with us and we revised his book together. It was very useful to translate the sentences one by one together. He taught us how is important to choose the correct vocabulary. We decided on which word is appropriate in the context. I should say that I really enjoyed from this course because for my final paper I took the article about ‘Turkish tea’ which was my choice. I had fun while searching unknown words related to my works. In addition, in my final project, I searched about Fethiye, which is the most popular place in Turkey. As I was familiar with Fethiye, I benefited from my background knowledge. While translating I considered the places that I visited and the culture and holiday that I experienced.

As a general, I learned many terms related to many different areas. I learned many theories which were very effective. Ciplakli Village and Saftirik was enjoyable which gave chance to study the daily and informal language while Ted Talk and Bizim English required much more vocabulary knowledge. For this class, wikispaces is a good website for sharing our works. Although most of my friend had difficulty working on this website, I found easy because of my experience in U.S.A. I like using websites in courses.If I had chance, I would like to have more translation courses. I think that translation course is crucial course in our department because we will always need to translation in our teaching life. If had chance to change the program I would change some courses with translation. Thank you for this course.