Since every human being needs food to exist, it is natural students in translation studies programs to be interested in the subject.That’s because it is a subject that is familiar to all nationalities and cultures. Regardless of his or her native language, everyone involved in translation, from beginning students to experienced translation workers, have their own opinion on it. That is because all of us are emotionally related to food. While it is an important part of our lives, it also plays an important role in celebrations that can include national holidays, religious celebrations, birthday parties, wedding receptions, and the entertaining of friends and neighbors.

All translation students and professionals have opinions about food and just about everything related to it. While Russian Translation Professionals like talking about borscht, German Translation workers boast about the qualities of their sausages and Medical Translation workers just ask us to eat healthy. In addition, all translation workers prefer one particular style of food or other such as fast food, junk food, cafeteria food, ethnic food, restaurant food, and the snacks and popcorn you munch at a movie theater. Moreover, all of us have different preferences about what we like to put on our food like salt, ketchup, red pepper, various kinds of sauces, sauerkraut and so on.

Our activities in our series of articles titled, Eat The Russian to English Translation, are focused on food. The topic of the series is food, however, we offer a wide variety of language-related instructional activities. One article may give information about verbs, another may discuss vocabulary and the next may be about writing a topic. Some days, only a word game will fill the bill—something that will wake students up to paying attention to the languages they study.

Many of the activities in our series of writings involve games and creativity. It is intentional - in my opinion language games play an essential part in building language skills. Students need to get interested in words and their quirkiness, changeability and power. The task of English teachers is to get kids involved in language. Play is a powerful means to do so.

Although the idea to create this series of articles was mine, I was not the only one to work on it. In fact, my contribution to making it possible was quite humble. Sarah Von Seggern, a English to German Translation worker and Michael Antipov, a Russian Translation professional, worked alongside me and assisted in so many ways—writing, proofreading, fact-checking, you name it. I also have to thank to Sandra Hernandez, a Spanish Translation professional, who also cooperated with me in the development of this series. I hope you will find this series of articles enjoyable and it will be useful in your translation sessions.

How are your discussions about food held when in class? Do you talk about a time when everything went wrong while you were making a special meal? Do you enjoy remembering your great-grandmother’s homemade ravioli? Did a humorous event take place to a family member while eating out? Do you have your little jokes about how you all hated to eat the food, prepared by a relative because it tasted terrible?

In the first task, we encourage you to write a story about food. If you need some help thinking of one you may ask your classmates, friends and instructors to make suggestions. If you can’t think of anything at all, write about anything you remember and is related to food - maybe a special occasion where food was served, or special meal.

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