A good practice for translations

My teacher taught me a good way to practice translations.

After translating one language to another, let's say, English to Japanese, translate the Japanese text back to English again without seeing the original.

The purpose is not to get it back, completely in every detail, but to make it make the same sense as the original text.

It will work better and also be harder to do, if you wait a little while until you forget the original text.

I tried it once and found it was very hard for me, but it might be a good practice.