This course-book of Translation & Interpretation-1 includes activities and strategies to help students learn to translate and interpret texts from Education and Technology reports of VOA Learning English, short stories from literature and some readings from “Chicken Soup for the Soul”. The selected texts and the teaching activities designed in the course-book were based on the following premises. 

Education & Technology reports were reported as efficient materials to help students learn new knowledge in science, specialized vocabulary, and grammatical structures, as well as updated information (Pham Vu Phi Ho, 2015, 2016). Besides, video clips of these reports are available for download from Youtube.com so the students can use them to practice their pronunciation which is essential for interpretation skills. 

Readings extracted from the book series “Chicken Soup for the Soul” and short stories from literature were used not only to train students how to translate, learn structures and vocabulary, be familiar with cultures while doing translation, but also to help students learn meaningful lessons in life. This is one of the primary goals in education and training. 

Discussion activities in the course-book were designed to help students activate their background knowledge (schema) relating to the new knowledge that they are going to learn so that they can understand the texts better during the translating or interpreting activities. Skimming and scanning activities were employed to help students pick out some vocabularies, phrases or sentences which are unknown or difficult. Then group discussions were used to help students learn from one another. In addition, writing story summaries is intended to help students learn how to pick up main ideas and information which is helpful for them in their interpreting activities.

Finally, homework in the course-book was used as a guideline to help students prepare for lessons in advance so that they can actively participate in the learning classroom.