Guided / scaffolded translation activities

There's a renewed focus on translation in Modern Languages teaching in the UK. The GCSE exam will soon include some form of translation to and from the target language. 

Exactly what form that will take remains to be seen, but I thought I'd put together a post on the ways textivate can be used to help create scaffolded translation activities -- with varying levels of support provided to the student.

This post focuses on translation into the target language, which is where I think textivate can be more useful.

Parallel texts

The parallel text feature of textivate allows you to specify an additional text to appear alongside the textivate exercises. (See this blog post for more details.)

If this parallel text is in English, it's a great way of providing structured translation practice.

And you can provide translation-type activities at various levels, ranging from putting chunks together to putting words together to filling in letters etc. See the examples below. The ones toward the end of the list are more like true translation activities.