FreeTranslation.com in the classroom

3/27/2007 01:24:00 PM

Posted by Jay Marciano, Director, Machine Translation Development

A FreeTranslation.com user with the pseudonym Spanish Student raised a thoughtful question about whether it is fair to use FreeTranslation.com for homework. The technology behind FreeTranslation.com is a powerful tool. Tools are generally designed for a specific purpose but can certainly be used for unintended purposes. A hammer, for instance, is designed to drive nails but can be used just as easily to break a vase. Automatic translation is intended as a communication tool, not a language-learning tool. So, the real question here is whether using FreeTranslation.com to complete a homework assignment actually helps you to achieve the intended goal of the assignment.

There are many methods, strategies, and even computer programs for learning languages, but there is no way around the fact that it takes a great deal of hard work to become truly proficient in a new language. I remember all too well that homework can be drudgery, so it is not surprising that students would try to minimize the effort by using a translation website. Ideally, though, your homework assignments are designed by your teacher to help you recognize and use the vocabulary and grammar of the new language. If you are serious about learning a new language, then you have to be serious about the homework. With that in mind, I think that using FreeTranslation.com to avoid spending the time and effort that is necessary to learn a language is indeed cheating. But let’s be clear: you are primarily cheating yourself of the opportunity to learn a skill that can be tremendously beneficial. (End of lecture!)

I whole-heartedly agree with Spanish Student that it is a good idea to discuss the use of FreeTranslation.com with your foreign-language teacher. Your teacher might not see any educational value in FreeTranslation.com. But you might find that he or she has been trying to find interesting ways to use FreeTranslation.com in the classroom.

I have often thought that there must be many ways that FreeTranslation.com could be used constructively by teachers of foreign languages. For instance, your teacher could ask you to compare an automatically generated translation to a professionally produced translation. A discussion of the differences could yield valuable insight into the structure of the language or the use of idiomatic expressions.

Or, your teacher could ask you to write sentences in your own language with specific vocabulary items. You could then run your sentences through FreeTranslation.com and compare the translations of the vocabulary items to the information that you find for those words in a dictionary. In a given sentence, FreeTranslation.com will only provide one translation per word, but a good bilingual dictionary will give you many other possibilities. Can you use the information in the dictionary to create a better translation?

Here’s an idea that really sounds like fun: Who in your class can come up with the longest sentence (in either your native language or your new language) that translates well on FreeTranslation.com?

Have you come up with any creative and educationally constructive uses for FreeTranslation.com? If you have, please let us know! We’d be happy to publish your ideas here.