Description: Paul is originally from England but he lives in Edinburgh. In 'real life' he is a translator and English teacher, but he also plays Scottish music in a Ceilidh band. He talks about his jobs, his students, the role of English as a lingua franca and, of course, about the Ceilidh.

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What I do

Paul: Ok, my name is Paul. I live just outside Edinburgh and I have a variety of jobs actually. I don't just work in one job from morning ... conventional job from morning to evening, I have a number of different jobs. First of all I teach English as a foreign language to foreign students in the mornings and then I usually go home and I often have some technical translation from German to English. And then I also play in a Ceilidh band. I play in a Scottish band, a band which plays Scottish traditional music for dancing, mostly at weekends. / I normally teach, as I say, five mornings a week Monday to Friday nine, roughly three hours each morning. And I teach adults, young adults to ... Sometimes people can be even forty or fifty years old, come from different countries. In the school I teach in there are quite a lot of people from Brazil, a lot from China, from Korea also, some from Japan and some from various European countries. /
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 171 Duration: 1m37

The Language School I work with

Paul: The school I teach in was originally founded as a school designed to assist missionaries from Brazil. The purpose of the school was to help Brazilian missionaries from mainly, I think, Baptist Christian backgrounds to learn English so that they could teach and work in other countries where English was a second language, a dominant second language. But the school is not now a Christian school. It still receives a lot of students from Brazil and also from Korea, where there are many Christians, but increasingly students come from China also. Since China opened up economically, more and more Chinese students have been coming to Britain and to other countries in Europe to study, to learn English, also to take university courses. So our school along with other schools also prepares Chinese and other students for university courses in Britain.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 140 Duration: 1m27

My translation job

Sabine: OK, and what do you do in your translation job?
Paul: I work with ... through two ... in a sense two agencies. By chance I met ... I got to know someone who lives in Munich, who works also part time in translation, and through her I have ... every week I have a certain amount of technical translation related to computer products. Press clippings and so forth about specific computer products relating to one company. I also receive work from an agency in Stuttgart which is mostly connected with the automotive industry - Robert Bosch products. So, technical translation of press material, press releases, technical material, speeches at automobile ... international automobile shows by directors of the Robert Bosch company, for example.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 118 Duration: 1m24

The translation market

Sabine: Do you think the translation ... I'm a translator myself, is the translation profession changing for example to the influence of technology?
Paul: Interesting. The reason I began teaching English as a foreign language, for which I had to take a four-week intensive course to get the certificate, the qualification, was because the translation work was actually drying up, was getting smaller. I wasn't getting as much work as I had done previously. I'm not sure why that was except in general terms that Germany was going through a recession. So, presumably companies were not advertising as much, they were not doing as much publicity, promotion. I can't think of another reason for that. I'm not aware of a particular change in the need for translation as such. That maybe the case but I'm not aware of any.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 137 Duration: 1m09

Founding a Ceilidh band

Sabine: Ok. So shall we talk a little bit about the band?
Paul: Well yeah the band. That's my social life. A long time ago I was interested in international folk dance and I used to ... I joined a group in Edinburgh, here in Scotland, and one of the other people in the group was a man called Colin. And we used to meet every week, and we used to dance folk dances from ... could be from Bulgaria, from Hungary, from France, from Germany, from anywhere. And then I lost contact with him. In the meantime I had my own business, I had a shop in Edinburgh where I sold kites and juggling materials and toys and other things, and then one day I met Colin in Edinburgh, and he said: 'Oh, I'm thinking of starting a band. Do you play anything?' So I said: 'Well, as a matter of fact I play the keyboards, I play the piano.' And he said: 'Oh, well, maybe you would like to meet the other members of the band.' That was eight years ago. And we've been playing continuously since then.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 187 Duration: 1m32

Playing the Ceilidh

Paul: We play almost every weekend, mostly for weddings and parties. There are now five members of the band. We have a fiddle player, I play keyboard, there's another member who plays banjo and mandolin, and another member who plays guitar, bass guitar, and Colin who calls and also plays the drum. And we, as I say, we play mostly for weddings and parties. It's become very fashionable in Scotland in the last few years for people to have their wedding in a hotel or even a castle and in the evening to have a Ceilidh. Now, a Ceilidh is actually a Gaelic word, a Scottish Gaelic word which means a party, originally where people would sing and dance, tell stories, tell poems, read poems or whatever. Now it really means just a dance. So, as part of the ... after the wedding celebration, after the wedding meal in the evening there's a Ceilidh, which means that we play music for people to dance traditional Scottish dances. Sometimes people ask us to play a mixture of Ceilidh music and pop music, rock music, whatever. We do that as well. /
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 187 Duration: 1m41

An Englishman in Scotland

Sabine: How does it feel for you being English and playing in a band Scottish music?
Paul: Yeah that's true, I'm English. I was born near Manchester, but I've lived for more than twenty years in Scotland. I'm not Scottish, I don't have a Scottish accent, which actually my language students appreciate, but, no, I feel very much at home here. I feel connected to Scottish music, I love dancing the Scottish dances. It's very frustrating when I have to sit for three hours, four hours in an evening and I'm just playing and not dancing. So I don't feel that I shouldn't be playing this music, no.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 106 Duration: 0m56

Teaching English as an International Language

Sabine: I wanted to ask you one more question about challenges of an English teacher, because English is becoming such a global language, you know. Whether you think ... because that's something we are discussing at the moment very much.
Paul: Yeah I think that's a really interesting question because ... I mean, it's quite obvious that English is becoming the new Lingua Franca of the world. In commerce, in ... I mean even in German, English expressions in technical things, the language is full of English. I feel there's a very great responsibility and I try to respond to that responsibility by ... In the material that I use in my lessons where at the higher levels I feel it's important to ... not to see language as simply elements which can be put together to make sentences. Interestingly there's an exhibition by a Scottish artist in Edinburgh at the moment. The exhibition is only words. Words written on walls. But one of his sentences, one of his thoughts is 'stupidity reduces language to only words'. And that's a very interesting thought . Language is much more than words. Words are the very basic elements, beyond that there is a meaning which is much more than words. And a meaning which can have, for example, a moral content. / So for me language without ... which is merely functional, which merely describes objects and processes is not interesting. Language which does not have a moral content, which does not address issues such as freedom, responsibility, love, these important aspects, if that does not become part of a language lesson or if there is ... if the teacher does not bring something of that into their language teaching, I think I'm not happy, I'm not satisfied with that - for me. And I find many of the course books are deficient in that respect. They use what is for me trivial material. Whereas I think in our time we are faced with so many ... there is ... there are so many challenges in the world which are fundamentally of a moral, ethical character that the language teaching must reflect that in some way.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 352 Duration: 3m28

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Acknowledgements, availability and copyright

Acknowledgements: The project has been supported by the University of Tuebingen. The video interviews have been carried out and recorded by Sabine Braun, Stefanie Hahn, Petra Hoffstaedter and Kurt Kohn. The speakers have agreed to the use of the materials for non-commercial research and education purposes.

Availability of the ELISA corpus: The ELISA corpus is made available by the Department of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Tuebingen. It is freely available at this website for study, teaching and research purposes, and copies of the transcripts may be distributed, as long as this statement of availability appears in the text. However, if any portion of this material is to be used in educational presentations and publications, permission must be obtained in advance. Commercial use of any form is excluded. For further information about permissions, please contact Dr. Sabine Braun at s.braun(at)surrey.ac.uk.

Copyright of the ELISA corpus: Department of Applied English Linguistics, University of Tuebingen.