Education/News/January 2020/Joint translations as language studying tool in Karvachar’s Wikiclub

Joint translations as language studying tool in Karvachar’s Wikiclub

Summary: Joint translations of articles on Wikipedia help Armenian school students to be better at foreign languages. This experience is carried at Karvachar's Wikiclub.

Students at joint translation at wikiclub
School students are working together
Young editors translating an article together

Wikiclubs in The Republic of Armenia and Artsakh are centers of non-formal education for schoolchildren in their communities. Working mainly on three projects – wiktionary, wikisource and wikipedia the school students get an opportunity to gain more knowledge out of their school curriculum, to improve their computer skills, to work with texts and to enhance their knowledge of foreign languages.

The wikiclubs coordinators usually make efforts to connect the editing process in wikiclubs with the school curriculum. To achieve this goal articles connected with the school subjects are generally chosen to be written and the young editors can share additional information with their classmates. The schoolchildren noticeably improve the knowledge of foreign languages (mainly Russian and English) as they attend wikiclubs.

Karvachar wikiclub has some special activities to improve the translation skills of the young editors. The students call them “let’s translate together”. Joint translations are done once a week from Russian and the same from English.

“The joint translations give us an opportunity to work together and develop our translation skills. We not only learn many new words, but also study the context translation. Translating articles from Wikipedia is especially important as we study also modern words and new meanings of many familiar words”, Lena Ghazaryan, 14.

“As we translate the articles together from Russian we learn to formulate correct sentences and also get acquainted with various grammar rules”, Harut Chilingaryan, 12.

The joint translations train the students to teamworking, doublechecking of facts and also relying on each other.

“During joint translations of English I understand better what I’ve learned during school classes. While translating I learn lots of new words which I can use in the future. Now I can say for sure that I’m one of the best in our house or in the class at English”, Elen Gevorgyan, 13.

Joint translations of English were started in September (at the beginning of the academic year) and 5 students of 8th and 9th grades are attending. Every Thursday they meet up at Karvachar Wikiclub, split up into two groups, each choose an article and translate it together discussing words and sentences. At the end they check the article with coordinator, wikify it and publish it on Armenian Wikipedia. During the last three months as a result of that meetups schoolchildren made 20 articles about different museums.

“We are translating articles about museums and so I not just study English but also learn a lot about museums, acquire interesting and useful information”, Taguhi Saghyan, 13.

The process of joint translations of Russian is done in a different way. All the participants (the number is 5-10) are opening an already chosen article in Russian, reading it sentence by sentence and translating it into Armenian. The article then is published by the username of one of the participants. The coordinator corrects students’ both pronunciation and translation mistakes. As a result, all the participants are listening to the correct translation of the sentence. The experience and knowledge gained during joint translations of Russian also helps some of the young participants to contribute to Armenian Wikipedia personally.

Armenian Wikipedia, WikiClub

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