Training of Moscow Guide-Translators

This page is run by Ekaterina Olegovna Author and teacher of Training of Moscow Guide-Translators course

Training of Moscow Guide-Translators
(in English)

This original course: Training of Moscow Guide-Translators is aimed at senior forms in schools with a focus on humanities is a pre-profile preparation course tailor-made for pupils. In Linguistics School-Lyceum it is aimed at 7th – 9th Form pupils.

The creation of this curriculum came out of the necessity to prepare pupils for a real dialogue with culture, away from theory and as it were works as a transition to cementing practical skills. After listening to a delegation of their peers, pupils themselves wish to conduct excursions around their home town. This desire is perfectly justified all the more so because many school leavers attain a level in a foreign language of independent user whilst pupils knowledge of standard school subjects such as history, literature and world history of art offer a good content base for preparing excursions.

Having said that interdisciplinary connections do not always receive enough integration into the education system. From this emanates a certain fragmentation of knowledge which prevents the forming of a complete world picture in the context of world culture.

Integrated courses like the Guide-Translator course can significantly facilitate a solution to this issue.

This course may be divided into two parts: the guide part (informational) and the translator part (practical). Each part resolves a whole range of issues aiming to form communicative competence and bilingualism.

Aside from fulfilling educational tasks the course contains deep instructional and developmental components. The course may encourage pupils to overcome an overly rationalistic approach to learning. The course is oriented towards the formation of a multifaceted developed personality with an individual world outlook and fostering a conscious awareness of the significance of the local cultural heritage and its legacy on world culture. During the course museum visits and trips to historical sites, participation in and independent conduct of excursions are organized.

By way of reinforcing the course material the following modes of work are employed: project preparation, joint discussion of issues, debates, presentations and reports. All this is conjoined with forming the capability to independently seek out information, analyse it, systematize it, generalize on the information received, draw the main conclusions from it, compile notes, prepare and present findings in the form of verbal presentations.

The practical aspect of the course concerns pupil speech development both in Russian and in English and the ability to interact with an audience.

One of the most important tasks of the course is to create the mechanism of deverbalisation or the ability to detach oneself from the formal signs of specific words, to remember the main gist of the message and to transmit it using other words.

It is necessary for guides and translators to develop listening skills including the aural sense, memory, prediction by probability and articulation.

Transformation skills are necessary for guides and translators to develop: a) syntactic and semantic transformation (explaining words, learning polysemous words, replacing words with synonyms / antonyms etc.) and b) grammatical transformations..

All exercises are interrelated with the course in Rhetoric and especially with one of its components, namely, mistakes in the speech act and working on correcting them. Alongside this pronunciation and stress, correct choice of word while considering its special meaning and lexical collocation skills are developed.

As far as the practical tasks of the course are concerned it is worth bearing in mind such aspects of the Rhetoric course as the ability to command one’s voice, interact with listeners and interlocutors, work on speech composition, use various means of putting one’s thoughts across as well as ways of achieving verbal smoothness and expressiveness.

Museum visits, trips to historical sites, participation in and conduct of excursions are organized. Visit to the Kremlin museums, the Zaryade Area and Moscow churches are included. But the main thing is that during excursions pupils themselves right in the heart of Moscow talk right in the heart of Moscow talk about Red Square, OkhotniyRyad, Teatralniy Square, Tverskaya Street, the Zaryade Area and Victory Park … The course includes thematic coach and walking tours Of Moscow.

Walking tours

1. Pokrovskii Cathedral
2. Red Square
3. Archaeology Museum
4. OkhotniyRyad, Alexandrovskii Sad, Manezhnaya Square
5. TeatralnayaSquare, Revolution Sqare
6. Tverskaya Street
7. Church of Christ the Saviour
8. Victory Park
9. AngliiskoePodvore
10. Sales outlets in the Zaryade Area
11. Varvarka Street and KitaiGorod
12. Novodevichii Monastery (2)
13. The Kremlin (2)
14. Rooms in the Armoury
 

Coach tours

Literary Excursions around Moscow

1. N.V. Gogol
2. M.A.Bulgakov
3. A.P. Chekhov
4. Pushkin’s Moscow
5. A.S.Griboedov
6. M.Yu. Lermontov
7. 19th Century Poets and writers
8. Zamoskvareche and Ostrovskii
 

ArchitectureExcursions around Moscow
9. 15th – 20th Century Architecture of Moscow
10. Classicism
11. Constructivism
12. Art Nouveau
13. Moscow Monasteries
14. Moscow Royal Courts
 

Miscellaneous Excursions around Moscow
15. World religions with visits to Russian Orthodox Churches, Mosques and Synagogues
16. Mysteries and legends of Moscow
17. Defence of Moscow including a trip Snegiri
18. 1812 Napoleonic War
Pupils also obtain a broad overview of information on out of town trips to:
- Zvenigorod
- Bolshie Vyazemi and Zakharovo
- Noviy Jerusalem
- Ostafevo
- Alexandrov
- SergievPosad
- Pereslavl-Zaleskii and other Golden Ring towns
- Kolomna
- Melikhovo with a visit to Davidovo Desert
- Polenovo
- Yasnaya Polyana
 

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