February 28, 2007

The Philosopher's Stone of Software

In my last post I reviewed some of the free software that Google offers and discussed how one could use it in the classroom. This time, I'd like to talk about another free Google product, but it's one that has a "darker" side to it, at least in terms of its educational applications. I'm referring to Google's Language Tools. There are four tools; three of them are useful but innocuous. The "Translate" feature is my subject here.

Translate gives you a choice of twenty-five language pairs (English/Spanish, French/German, etc.). After choosing your pair, you enter the URL of a website, and Google will translate it from one language to another. (To see TeachingTech in Spanish, for example, click here.) You could also copy text from a Word document or some other source and paste it in for translation. The result in many cases is far from perfect. Too often, it sounds like Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat--strings of three or four words make sense but full sentences are convoluted and unclear. So Google's Translate is the philosopher's stone of language translation--that legendary substance that could transform any material into gold. Never mind that the result isn't twenty-four carat; the quality of the translation will only improve over time.

As you'd expect, the accuracy of the translation is related to the degree of complexity of the source text. Beginning level English-to-Spanish, for example, comes through reasonably well. A Spanish-to-English translation of an article from the technology section of a Venezuelan newspaper is clumsy and fractured. To some degree however, this is true of language translations done by anyone with less than the highest level of fluency in the source and target languages.

For teachers, and especially for language teachers, Google's Translate raises some interesting questions. For example, if a teacher of first-year French asked students to translate a paragraph from English to French, what grade would he give to the paragraph generated by Translate? Probably not an A, but probably not an F either. I showed two paragraphs from this blog to a Spanish teacher at my school. She said that, although she could understand it, it wasn't well written and contained a number of errors. But that's probably what she'd say about my Spanish too. (I've been studying Spanish since moving to Venezuela in 2004.)

There's no point in trying to prevent students from using Translate; if it's available on the web, they'll find it sooner or later. So teachers need to develop strategies to live with it, or better yet, to use it as a tool to teach languages more effectively.

Here's a hypothetical homework assignment that language teachers give regularly: Write a paragraph describing what you did over the weekend. The student could write the paragraph in English and then run it through Translate to get a version in Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, German, Korean, or Japanese. Unquestionably this would be a case of academic dishonesty. And unquestionably it would be trivial for the student to accomplish and difficult for the teacher to detect.

But would it be dishonest for a student to use Translate to get to a starting point, a basic translation, and then clean up the grammar and vocabulary himself? Is it much different than asking a tutor or another student for help? My guess is that language teachers wouldn't all agree either way. Now suppose the teacher gave the original English version plus the Google translation and asked the students to correct the errors. Is that a reasonable assignment?

One day, perhaps in the foreseeable future, Google's Translate will be able to pass the Turing test, and it will be impossible to tell if the translation was done by man or machine. In the meantime, teachers should be aware of what Translate can do and adjust their teaching strategies to accommodate or better yet, use it to their advantage. No technology is inherently bad. Translate has a potential dark side, but with creativity, we teachers can use it as another tool in our technology toolkit.

Next: Worth More Than a Thousand Words

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jim, it's great to see another IB blogger out there! I liked your ideas about iPods, photography, etc, and look forward to reading more.