Yesterday I told students that because of the weather and poor road conditions, they could stay at home and send in the class activity by email. The weather was quite nasty, and unusual for this area. I thought they’d all stay home.
But they all showed up. The wind chill, the sleet, Friday morning. Yet everybody came. And you know what? I don’t think they came for me, great as I am.
It’s because this is a translation course. Translation kicks you into the deep focus zone like nothing else. And being in the zone feels good. These are young people, and only one is an athlete. They don’t have much experience in the zone. It’s like I’m feeding them drugs in those translation activities. It’s almost unfair.
I have no idea why translation triggers the zone. Maybe these are two areas in the brain that are close together.
Another thing I noticed, working with tables, even the simplest ones that you can draw in MS Word, can kick you into the zone. I draw a lot of tables that I don’t really need because it works. Every test I design for my language courses opens with a table.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Translation kicks you into the deep focus zone like nothing else”
sometimes…. sometimes it seems to melt your brain as you realize that while you understand source-sentence perfectly well you have no earthly idea how to lexicalize it in the target (and your native) language…
sometimes it makes you want to bang your head against the wall when you realize part of it is quoting a text in your native language that you have no realistic way of accessing…. I usually remove the quotation marks and hope their translation was reasonably accurate
sometimes it stops you from entering the zone when you realize you have to look up a bunch of EU regulations (I’m very good at that now… )
sometimes I’m left howling at the moon “Why doesn’t anyone want to translate something that’s both interesting and well written?”
Translation doesn’t send me into a deep focus zone because it fires up too many conflicting pathways in the brain….
What kicks me into the deep focus zone is transcription (taking an oral text and writing down what’s being said). I discovered that back in undergraduate days in a text in discourse analysis.
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That’s fascinating because I find transcription endlessly frustrating. It sends my BP straight up, I start fussing, dropping things. The human brain is truly something.
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Not good enough in any additional language to get this effect, but I can access it learning new music.
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Curious, how do you work with the tables for your tests?
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It’s nothing fancy. Just a small table to organize the notes they take during listening comprehension.
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