THE DARK SIDE OF TEXTBOOKS: TRANSLATOR'S POV

Hello everyone! It's Noelia!

It's lovely blogging for all of you.

This week, my role to developed has been the translator.As some of my groupmates have explained you before, the translator must explain the 5 most important terms of the task done using his or her own words.

From my poing of view, the 5 most important terms of "the dark side of the textbooks" have been the ones below:

1. Textbooks: The textbooks are the current books of paper used in the majority of the world's schools. Reading some literature and just being a little aware of what is happening nowadays, we can realize that textbooks are part of one of the most common debates in the society (we may call it, "Textbooks vs eTextbooks"). In this debate, Textbooks are criticised for being outmoded (as we are in in the digital age and they are a XIX Century's tool) for being a tool which is possible to transmit political ideology and limitating the knowledge (to be acquired) with.

2. eTextbooks: The eTextbooks are electronic textbooks. These are used in schools. However, they are less used than the Textbooks as their introduction in schools is not supported by everyone, and mainly by the textbooks editorials, because it could cause the end of a very succesful business.

3.Influence: It is the action of producing an specific effect (and getting that effect is the main goal of this action) on someone else. In education, the influence can be done by the political parties through the textbook and effect students. The textbooks, depending on the political period, can include some units (or some explanations for the units) that reflect or are characteristic features of the ideology of such political parties.

4. Limitated knowledge: When we talk about limitated knowledge in the school environment we refer to the reality that student just learn the knowledge which is included in the textbooks or in any other instrument used for teaching the curriculum (but generally the textbooks are the only instrument used). Because of this, they are not able to investigate, study or suggest any other topic which they can learn a different knowledge with. So we have a limitated knowledge.

5. Comic: A comic is a story told with drawings showed in several bulllets. In each bullet, the illustration can be supported by speech bubbles. The comic may be used instead of a simple written story because, with the comic, you can transmit a message with more success than with such written story as, with the last one, a person's imagination interferes and makes the message received different from the real one. 

I hope you  have understood them well. Sometimes it is a bit difficult to express your version of something when you have read several point of views about it (all true,in my opinion).

And thanks to Jordi Ardell, he has given to me the best explanations for understanding everything about this topic. I definetely recommend his blog. It's great! (Here is the url: http://elbonia.cent.uji.es/jordi/)

See you next week!

Meerkat Translator