Online Translator Discussion

The following are some of my reflections after a department meeting about this topic.

As a language teachers, we have always found some satisfaction in the fact that electronic translators are imperfect. Our thinking around these tools has always been that they make terrible mistakes and if students use them to translate their own work, we will know because the result is often mumbo jumbo.

We started the meeting by watching this short video on Google Translate:

 
We also brought up Jibbigo in our conversations. This is a tool that does voice to voice translation on iPhones and is pretty remarkable.

Basically, things are changing. As translators get more and more sophisticated, students are able to produce more accurate work with the aid of these tools. While teachers can still detect their use by knowing a student's level and writing style, there is less and less mumbo jumbo. Don't get me wrong, they are still not perfect-- as a colleague pointed out in our meeting, language is interesting because of the baggage that words have. She used the example of vacation in English and vacances in French. The words translate, but they mean such a different thing to the people who speak them.

So the conversation could go two ways:

1) How can we continue to communicate the ineffectiveness of these tools and work to "catch" our students using them inappropriately?

or

2) How can we use the increasing sophistication of these tools to closely examine what we believe is essential to the work we do?

They are connected questions, but the latter seems much more compelling. There were lots of interesting comments on the topic and the conversation was thought provoking. We talked about why kids turn to these tools: the structure of assignments, the different motivation levels in students, and the mounting pressure for perfection in all realms of their lives. One colleague spoke eloquently about literacy in general and how different levels of reading and writing ability in the first language impact work in the second language.

We also talked about how, perhaps, this discussion is analogous to the ones that happened in math departments at the dawn of hand held calculators calculators.  Perhaps not a perfect analogy, but it is interesting.

Our take away seemed to be that we would like to produce a document, a philosophy (including "rules"?) about these tools to facilitate our conversations with students. (In the early hours of the morning I imagined a short PSA video. . . we'll see if that comes to be.)

The central themes would be that our classes are about helping students fine tune their ability to communicate that which is meaningful to them in linguistically and culturally appropriate terms. There are many tools to support this learning, (textbooks, dictionaries, on-line translators, friends, etc. . .) but our main concern is not the content that resides in these tools, but, rather, the content that is honestly generated by the hearts and minds of our students.