Skriftlig Blues

Last night at language school we had to write an essay selected from a choice of language related themes. We had to write on the school computers and then save it on a USB stick for the teacher. Which was fair enough. Although, whatever happened to writing by hand, I'll never know. But anyway, for one of the few times in my life, I caught a break when I discovered that one of the topic choices was the same topic as I had used for my oral presentation the week before. It doesn't usually work like that. Typically we have to report on a set topic in a choice of writing styles. It can be as a straight report, and investigative angle, or as a debate. I often just start writing and then figure out, about half way through, which style my text is going to be best suited to. But last night was a bit more straight forward.

It went ok, I think. The verdict comes out next week. I was a bit disappointed to discover that access had been blocked to my ever trusty on-line Swedish-English dictionary, and to Google Translate. I must confess that I do use Google Translate quite a lot. Most often just to get me started. I can fire down thoughts in English, take the Swedish translations and use them to build my text around. Instead of having to start from scratch. Now, before anyone starts crying foul, I have to say, in my defence, that I seldom leave the Google Translate text in it's original copied form. Unless it's obvious that there's only one way to write something. Early on our teacher told us that she had seen some much Google Translate text that it was dead easy to spot. And she's right. I can spot it without too much effort when a Swede has used the same programme to translate back into English. It often is a bit too literal and just doesn't hang right. Knowing that she's on the hunt for any rogue translators, I take a bit of time to move the text around to a more sensible format and to add my own touches to it. But it does give a good start.

Not having access to an on-line Swedish-English dictionary was a bit un-necessary I thought. Especially when we had hard copies of translation dictionaries in front of us to use. But there must have been some reason for it. We also had a copy of Natur och Kulturs Stora Svenska Ordbok which is, in my opinion, one of the best books a person can have when studying Swedish. As well as being a dictionary it also shows all the different ways a word can be used, giving practical examples and normal expressions for each situation. A very handy book, and I refer to it a lot.

The main stumbling block last night, was actually our teacher. I guess she had nothing else to do while we were all writing, but could she not have found something better to do than to laugh every couple of minutes at comments on her friends' Facebook pages ? To be fair, she was kind enugh to read the comments out loud to us. So that we wouldn't feel left out. Didn't really help my efforts though. To show that she really was considerate, she announced after about 20 minutes that we were all going to stop for a coffee break. Which turned out to be a 45 minute natter session in the teachers' lounge. In the end I just got up and announced I was going back to the computer suite. No one else seemed to take the hint, included the teacher, so I was alone in the room for another 15 minutes. Which was probably the most productive period of the evening.