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Explication Essay:

The Effectiveness of Translating a Journal Article to an Interview

Hanson Chen

Writing 2: Academic Writing

Julie Johnson

June 6, 2021
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Sight-reading is the ability to capture, reflect, and perform the primary melody, chord

progression, rhythm, and other musical elements on a newly-encountered music score. While it is

often considered marginal and dispensable by the majority of musicians, it is an essential

technique and an unavoidable hindrance for musicians, especially pianists, in their higher

pursuit.1 The peer-reviewed article I chose, “Sight-Reading Strategies For the Beginning And

Intermediate Piano Student: A Fresh Look At A Familiar Topic”, provides a series of strategies,

as well as corresponding practice drills for music teachers to train elementary and intermediate

music learners on their sight-reading skills. The article itself serves as a guidance for music

teachers to enhance the efficiency at training their students into better sight-readers. While this

article belongs to a popular and charming discipline, music, the author Pamela D. Pike integrated

advanced and abstract music terminologies and jargons to explain and exemplify her ideas,

narrowing down the audience scope of this article to trained musicians and music teachers. In

order to get broader audiences, who argue by Caroll that “should be able to comprehend and

reflect on the problem embedded”2 ,including piano learners and exam takers, into responding,

being inspired and motivated to improve their sight-reading skills, I translated this academic

journal into an interview of a popular and respected pianist. My translation performs convention

transformations including modifying music jargon into verbal expression and introducing

contexts of conversations to alleviate the burden of understanding as well as meet the new

rhetorical situation, whose exigence is to inspire laymen with shallower background knowledge.

In order to address the change of exigence during the translation, I rephrased the jargon

and terminology, and added the discussion of some background concepts. The chosen peer-

reviewed article utilizes both psychological approaches, such as the nature of visual cue
1 Pamela D. Pike. “SIGHT-READING STRATEGIES: For The Beginning And Intermediate Piano Student: A
Fresh Look At A Familiar Topic.” American Music Teacher 61, no. 4 (March 2012): 23.
2 Laura Bolin Carroll, “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis,” in Writing Spaces,
49.
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perception3 and musical examples, including music piece analysis, to provide a new perspective

of sight-reading training. By offering both theoretical and practical sight-reading training drills in

multidimensions including notes, chord progressions, and rhythms, this article meets the

exigence as an academic methodology article: presenting a new method or procedure to existing

problems as well as proving its validity. Unlike an academic article, an interview of famous

individuals aims to share valuable enlightenments or experience from the success of a particular

person to inspire and motivate normal people who are interested in their respective areas. As

Carroll asserts: “rhetorical discourse is usually responding to some kind of problem”,4 which is

the exigence. The exigence shift here is that the purpose changed from presenting academic

instruction for educated readers to sharing information to ordinary people as well as inspiring

them. For one thing, I eliminated the psychological explanation of the nature of perception in the

original article. While the psychological interpretation matches the purpose of explaining the

premise of the new approach to this problem by indicating its underlying principles to educated

music scholars, it does not fit in the exigence of being inspirational as it introduces complicated

concepts and discourages viewers to continue. In addition, I rephrased a big portion of the music

jargon including the music staff and the chord notation. For example, I rewrote “V6/5 chord in F

major” as “Me So Ti Do”5, and added a metaphor for “chunking” as “Playing a puzzle”. These

changes I made serve the purpose of mitigating the burden of receiving such information. Since

the purpose of this article shifted to be inspirational, simplifying the contents will shorten the

distance between the audience and the material, giving them more courage to apply those

strategies. Lastly, I extended the explanation of certain key concepts and gave the outcome of

3 Pamela, “SIGHT-READING STRATEGIES: For The Beginning And Intermediate Piano Student: A Fresh Look
At A Familiar Topic.” 24.
4 Carroll, Writing Spaces, 48.
5 Hanson, Chen, “Interview of Yilum Cheung on her marvelous sight-reading skills”, 4.
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incorporating such concepts in the training process. For instance, I included a sentence

explaining the necessity of obtaining “Chunking” abilities: “you don’t need to read every note on

the sheet.” This explanation is insignificant in a methodology journal as its exigence is

introducing practice drills to train such abilities, and the advantages of possessing such ability

are usually self-explanatory. However, it is essential in an interview since it unveils the mystery

of a fast sight-reader. Pointing out “sight-reading is not reading each note extremely fast” helps

consolidate the belief among interview viewers that sight-reading is not that hard, and implies

that everyone can do this.

Unlike a peer-reviewed music methodology article that targets well-educated music

teachers with solid music knowledge backgrounds, an interview from eminent individuals in the

music realm accepts teenage elementary music learners with beginner-level music knowledge as

their main audience. The transformation of the audience here is the second major change that I

took care of. Initially, I recreated an intriguing introduction in my translation to lure teenagers

into continuing watching the interview. In the original article, the author cites several quotes

about the significance of sight-reading from experts in the respective field to proffer the main

idea of the article. Although it is effective to evoke music professionals to read because of the

authority of these quotes, teenage audiences may underestimate the seriousness of these ideas.

Audiences react distinctly to certain contents. As Kerry Dirk anticipates: “You would probably

not send a ‘Hey Buddy’ email to your professor”6 because a professor will misunderstand your

“friendliness” as “being disrespectful”. In order to avoid letting teenage viewers consider the

interview “pedantic” instead of “Inspirational”, I added a plot that described how a pianist

6 Kerry Dirk, “Navigating Genres,” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, ed. Charles Lowe and
Pavel
Zemliansky (Parlor Press, 2010), 253.
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accidentally attracted other’s attention with her sight-reading skill at the beginning.7 A story plot

appeals to teenage viewers better than a quote does, contributing to the overall effectiveness of

this translation. Furthermore, instead of breaking the contents into four parts by distinguishable

bolded subheads, I inserted follow-up questions asked by the interviewer between sections to

elicit the next topic. Not as music teachers who are able to keep track of the contents and give

constant feedback, teenage music learners are less likely to keep up with multiple topics while

reflecting the interrelationships among them because of their lack of professional knowledge and

patience. By adding transition questions like “How do you practise recognizing them”,8 the host

in the interview becomes a guide for teenage viewers to keep their orientation and feel the

inference I am trying to make, which is a goal of writing.9

Other than making content-based modifications, I also applied contextual changes to let

the translation fit in the new constraint. While there are multiple forms of constraints within a

rhetorical situation, the most noticeable shifts here are the environment in which the audience

perceives the information and the formatt in which the texts are performed. It is crucial to take

care of the constraints since they are able to “Influence the audience’s response and the writer’s

potential to make changes.10 For an educated music teacher, it’s important to read a serious peer-

reviewed article in a quiet ambiance in order to focus. On the contrary, there are various

possibilities of the locations in which the teenage viewers watch the interview, as the interview

might be presented as a TV show, a radio program, or even a live activity held in public.

Audiences in such scenarios are unlikely to pay serious attention to the contents as the

7 Hanson, Chen, “Interview of Yilum Cheung on her marvelous sight-reading skills”, 1.

8 Hanson, Chen, “Interview of Yilum Cheung on her marvelous sight-reading skills”, 4.
9 L. Lennie Irvin, “What is ‘Academic’ Writing” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, ed. Charles
Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky (Parlor Press, 2010), 8.

10 "Rhetorical Situation," College Composition and Communication, National Council of Teachers of English,
2010, Gauchospace.
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environments are usually noisy and distracting. In order to address the shift from a quiet,

concentrating ambiance to merely its opposite, noisy and distracting, I made the following

changes: breaking down all the concepts and ideas as well as placing them within conversations.

Information in scholarly journals appears as chunks of condensed ideas and its following

analysis. For instance, the author placed “Motor Skills, Memory, and Problem solving” under a

single section and divided them via paragraphs.11 This provides the continuity that is required for

a journal article since the consecutiveness constitutes both the logical relationship and the

persuasion in a journal. However, continuity is not necessary for the previously mentioned

situation, since pouring massive amounts of information within a short amount of time makes the

audience disoriented, considering they are in an informal circumstance. By breaking all the ideas

down into small sections, I fit the text into the constraint which depicts a casual and informal

environment, making sight-reading more approachable. In addition, I added filler words like

“emm”, “you know”, and “well” into the translated text. Unlike a journal article which is

completed with all the information well-prepared, a conversation is much more flexible as the

direction of the conversation is decided by both sides of the dialogue. As Irwin indicates: “When

we speak, we inhabit the communication situation bodily in three dimensions, but in writing we

are confined within the two dimensional setting”. Unlike a paper writer who does not know by

whom the article is read and has to polish the grammar, tone, and wording, a person within a

conversation has the opportunity to make real-time reflection based on the feedback from the

other person. The filler words indicate that the speaker is speaking and thinking simultaneously.

By making these two changes, I transformed a serious presentation of academic ideas into a

11 Pamela, “SIGHT-READING STRATEGIES: For The Beginning And Intermediate Piano Student: A Fresh Look
At A Familiar Topic.” 25.
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casual and vivid conversation. This allows younger music lovers to relieve their burden from

understanding profound music knowledge and develop courage for themselves to practise.

Both the musicians from the current generation and the music learners from the next

generation must address and resolve sight-reading, a versatile yet underestimated skill for

musicians. By rephrasing and reinterpreting an peer-reviewed article musical journal article to a

lively and colloquial interview activity with relevant rhetorical situation modifications, I evoked

the curiosity as well as the motivation of sight-reading among younger music learners. Other

than instructors, this translation complements the other side of the expectation of the original

article: the instruction receivers. The collaboration of the journal article and the translated

interview provides a higher efficiency in sight-reading skill training in two dimensions, which is

the primary goal of the original article.

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Bibliography

Boyd, Janet. “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking),” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,

Volume 2 (2010): 88-101.

Carroll, Laura Bolin. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis,”

In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Vol. 1. Online: Parlor Press, 2010.

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres,” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1,

edited by

Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 249-262. Parlor Press, 2010.

Hanson, Chen. “Interview of Yilum Cheung on her marvelous sight-reading skills,” Writing2:

Introduction to Academic Writing, 2021, Google Drive.

Irvin, L. Lennie. “What is ‘Academic’ Writing” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,

Volume 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 3-17. Parlor Press, 2010.

National Council of Teachers of English. "Rhetorical Situation." College Composition and

Communication. 2010. Gauchospace.

Pamela, D. Pike. “SIGHT-READING STRATEGIES: For The Beginning And

Intermediate Piano Student: A Fresh Look At A Familiar Topic.” American Music

Teacher 61, no. 4 (March 2012): 23-28. JSTOR.