Professor of English and translation: “Language is a romance for life”

There is hopeful news from primary schools. After falling behind by almost a year over the past three years, Belgium’s 12-year-olds scored better for reading comprehension for the first time in June. So has the turnaround started? Professor Julie Deconinck hopes so. “To learn to read well, you have to put in the miles. That means a lot of reading, in other words. That requires motivation and focus. For this generation, that means not succumbing to the lure of social media.”

Julie Deconinck knows what she’s talking about. She teaches English and translation studies to undergraduate students in the Applied Linguistics programme and literary translation in the Master of Translation. At the SID-in fair, she likes to strike up a conversation with young people who – often thanks to an inspiring teacher – have found a love for language or literature or want to do “something with communication” in their career.

Julie Deconinck: “The students themselves are usually enthusiastic. You sometimes see the parents looking unsure. They are worried about the prospects for their child, especially if they’re the first in the family to go to university. It’s understandable, because studying is a hefty investment.”

How do you win these parents over?

“Those who love a language and master it to perfection can certainly turn that passion into a profession. Language then becomes a romance for life.”

Don’t we mainly need engineers, scientists and doctors to meet the great challenges of our time?

“Of course we need them. But those jobs require cooperation. And to work together, you need to be able to communicate well, with each other and with the rest of society, in an increasingly complex world, with the climate crisis, conflicts, growing inequality, disinformation... That’s where linguists, translators and other communication specialists come in. They build bridges, connect communities across language barriers and explain complex issues, at the level of each target audience and with the necessary nuance.

How bad is it that they’re struggling more with reading and writing?

“That really needs to be worked on. Everything starts with reading. For example, you can’t learn to write well if you don’t learn to read well. And to learn to read well, you have to put in the miles. So a lot of reading. Fiction, the newspaper, essays, it doesn’t really matter. Apparently, the big problem with this is a lack of motivation and focus. Children and young people have a harder time keeping their attention on a long text or a book than they used to.”

The pandemic won’t have helped with that

“That’s true, but it’s still mainly social media that causes distractions. That’s unfortunate. I sometimes call a love of reading a kind of superpower. You open a book and disappear into another world, into a story that completely drowns out the noise in your head and of the world. Through literature, you get to the core of what the human condition is. And reading is just really nice. In that respect, I don’t envy this generation. We didn’t have to tear ourselves away from a smartphone or social media.”

Reading different sources is also useful to be well-informed, isn’t it

“Using TikTok alone isn’t enough. With social media’s algorithms, you only get to see information that confirms your own perspective. That applies to all of us, but as a critical student, you should definitely not get stuck in that echo chamber.”

So in conclusion: education should focus on reading?

“Teachers know this better than anyone else. They do everything they can to get their pupils to read. I think it’s a good idea to give pupils as much autonomy as possible in what they read. It doesn’t have to be literature with a big L. Just as long as they read. That way, they develop an ear for a language and the culture behind it. You can also pique their curiosity. I used to have a teacher who would read a story aloud and stop at an exciting moment. Then we automatically became curious about the sequel. That’s the trick of the cliffhanger.”

AI: "It is an incredible tool, but you have to use it critically and ethically."

Students study together these days, to resist the temptation of social media. Maybe they should also read together?

“Why not? A colleague’s partner runs a plant shop/coffee shop and organises regular silent reading sessions there. That is apparently catching on.”

How do you feel about spelling and other writing errors? Older people sometimes complain that we have given up that fight.

“Have we? I don’t think we have. Young people do need to understand that a -dt spelling mistake won’t hurt you in a chat with friends, but it can bring you problems in a cover letter.”

Young people like to use literally translated English. They say “at the end of the day” when they mean “uiteindelijk” and “I see you” when they want to express their appreciation for another person.

“English is a cultural behemoth. That is why I advocate translation exercises, even in high school. If you want to faithfully reproduce the message from the source language in the target language, you are obliged to look for equivalents that match it as closely as possible in terms of content and emotional value. This is how you enrich your vocabulary. You then also learn that you cannot express a message in one language in the same way in another. For example, ‘Ik zie het niet zitten’ can’t be translated literally into English. At the same time, you also learn that you can convey a certain message in different ways in each language, albeit with slight differences in nuance. That’s what makes it so fascinating! You test out what’s possible in a certain language and what isn’t, and push the limits of what you can translate. In the end, you find that you can say much more than you thought beforehand.”

Can ChatGPT and other AI tools help?

“From next year, in the second bachelor year of the Applied Linguistics programme, we will start the Language and AI course. We think it’s important for students to learn how to work with artificial intelligence. It is an incredible tool, but you have to use it critically and ethically.”

Will AI replace human communication and make communication jobs obsolete?

“If I can choose between a robot and a human at a customer service desk, I will still choose the flesh-and-blood employee. Human communication and the connection it creates will always be important. Our students did an exercise this year where they produced texts via prompts to ChatGPT and compared them critically. The results looked good, but also formulaic – it all became a bit uniform. For a communications expert, it’s so important to find your own voice.”