1. Translate from any accessible book in the foreign language you can
read.
2. Subscribe for a period of at least two or three months for a newspaper
or magazine in that language, if it is a modern one. Translate as before,
but give most of your time to rapid oral translation for a real or
imaginary American hearer.
3. When you have completed your final written translation of a passage
from the foreign language, make yourself master of all the English words
you have not previously (1) known or (2) used, but have encountered in
your work of translation.
<2. Mastery through Paraphrasing>
It may be that you are not familiar with a foreign language. At any rate
you have some knowledge of English. Put this knowledge to use in
paraphrasing; for thus you will enrich your vocabulary and make it surer
and more flexible. The process of paraphrasing is simple, though the
actual work is not easy. You take passages written in English--the more of
them the better, and the more diversified the better--and both reproduce
their substance and incarnate their mood in words you yourself shall
choose.
You may have a passage before you and paraphrase it unit by unit. More
often, however, you should follow the plan adopted by Franklin when he
emulated Addison by rewriting the _Spectator Papers_. That is, you
should steep yourself in the thought and emotion of a piece of writing,
and then lay the piece aside until its wording has faded from your memory,
when you should reëmbody the substance in language that seems to you
natural and fitting. Much of the benefit will come from your comparing
your version, as Franklin did his, with the original. When you perceive
that you have fallen short, you should consider the respects wherein your
inferiority lies--and should make another attempt, and yet another, and
another. When you perceive that in any way you have surpassed the
original, you should feel a just pride in your achievement--and should
resolve that next time your cause for pride shall be greater still. Even
after you have desisted from formal paraphrasing, you should cling to the
habit, formed at this time, of observing any notable felicities in
whatever you read and of comparing them with the expression you yourself
would likely have employed.