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Article of the Month
March |
Online Translators
(Public Enemy)
“I practiced combining it in the east.”
For five minutes my brain stumbles over the entry in the student diary. There are no preceding sentences to give any indication about what “it” might be. Nor can I fathom why “it” would be combined, or what it was combined with, or why one would need to practice combining it.
Suddenly, inspiration strikes. I realize what the student wanted to say.
I go over to the nearest computer, do an internet search for online translators, and open the first one on the list. I select Japanese to English, type in 「東で合同練習した」and click the “translate” button.
“I practiced combining it in the east.”
My student was yet another victim of convenience.
I was not overly upset that several students had clearly used online translators to help them complete a difficult homework task. I’m sure that without the knowledge I have now, I too would have been tempted. After all, only the end result, the diary entry, was being assessed. The processes in writing the diary were not.
Spotting An Online Translator Job At 400 m
Translation software is allegedly improving all the time. I say allegedly because, although machines have an almost unlimited capacity for vocabulary and grammar rules, I have never seen anything come even close to what a human can do. Machines cannot read context, comprehend idiomatic speech, infer mood, or go much beyond literal translations.
This is particularly true when dealing with languages as different as English and Japanese.
I have mentioned in other articles the penchant for Japanese speakers to drop sentence subjects or objects, which would normally be required in an English sentence. Some J/E translators simply allow this to happen, but most will attempt to fill the space with a default. The most common default is “it”. So when the Japanese 「ご飯を食べた」is entered, the translation is “It ate dinner”, “It ate meal.”, or “It ate rice.” A plethora of sentences starting with “It” or containing “it” after verbs is a sure sign of the online translator at work. Some translators have finally cottoned on to this and now use “I” as the default subject. But there are still some tell-tale signs.
The next most obvious sign is strange vocabulary and expressions. For example, “I occurred late”, “I got on a bus about the station” and “The party was held in the family”, meaning “I got up late”, I arrived at the station and caught a bus” and “My family held a party”, respectively.
Other signs include overuse of passive voice, extreme overuse of articles (especially “the”, as in “The breakfast was the leftovers.”), and redundancies (“A day of Christmas”).
JIGO – Japanese In, Gibberish Out
Not surprisingly, the longer and more complex the original sentence is, the more likely the translated version is to be meaningless babble.
I was once given a translated text to check and edit. More than half of the text was incomprehensible, and I ended up asking for the original to translate myself. The complexity of the original, including vague subjects, omitted objects, and the vast number of Japanese structures which have no exact English equivalent prevented effective translation by the software.
Try this simple exercise. Go to any online translator and use the E/J translation function on a reasonably complex English sentence. (“It is said that one year for a human is the same as seven years for a dog” is a good example). Cut and paste the result onto the J/E function and see what you get. Repeating the process a couple of times will result in a sentence nothing like the original:
“It is said to be the same as seven years for a dog for a human being for one year it.”
Go figure.
Why They Are Evil
One of my former JTE’s (Japanese Teacher of English), a great partner and mentor once told me, “Never let the students take work home to complete – they’ll probably get their older siblings, or parents, or cram-school teachers to do it for them.” She only needed to add “online translators” to make the list complete.
Are online translators really that bad? From this ALT’s perspective, the answer is “yes”.
As a teacher, would you accept a piece of work that was merely copied from another student? Probably not. Yet, that is essentially what the online translator allows the student to do. (I think of it as a student copying someone who is no smarter than they are)
What does an electronically translated piece demonstrate about the student’s English ability? Apart from their ability to copy, very little.
The online translator robs a student of the need to think about language. Take a moment to reflect on that.
Say What You Mean
My afore-mentioned JTE used to make a point of telling her students to “break down what you want to say into smaller chunks” and to “think of another way of saying the same thing”. Realistically, there is no way the majority of our students can even come close to expressing themselves in English they same way they can in Japanese. The only way is for them to simplify and paraphrase the information until it matches their skill-base. Doing this forces them to re-evaluate how they express themselves, which is a very important skill in itself.
The younger generations are coming under fire for their lack of communication in their first language. Students are increasingly being told to “use a subject” instead of just an isolated verb. A study of English could also help them to attain this skill.
The student who uses an online translator, however, can merely input the sentence as it was originally phrased – including strings of de-contextualized verbs, and be none the wiser as to how they could have expressed themselves better.
How does this apply to my original example?
My student needed the realization that 「東」by itself does NOT convey “Higashi Junior High School”. A little thought could have broken the concept down to “We had combined practice at Higashi Junior High School”, or “We had club practice. We practiced with Higashi Junior High School.”, or any other variant that conveyed that information.
As we can see, students need to be made aware that the online translator is a “convenience” that prevents them from learning and forces them to make mistakes.
From the teaching perspective, it shows that we must care about the processes at least as much as we care about the result.
Or, as the online translator said,:
“The ways should worry as much as the results" |
Unfortunately for Japanese speakers, the English word "bread" is entynomogically unrelated.
