Is there some new automatic Internet translation program this academic year? (My suspect is Windows 11/Microsoft Edge.)
I am suddenly seeing relatively large numbers of students submitting answers written in Japanese for an English class, even when (as should not be necessary) instructions explicitly read “Answer in English and check your spelling.”
I’m also seeing an uptick of irrelevant answers in both Japanese and English that make sense *if* the instructions were badly translated.
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I don’t know how new it is, but DeepL is what I’ve switched to. Not perfect, but better than Google. Uses AI.
DeepL is becoming very popular in Japan. It tends to create more coherent translations than other translation software, meaning people who aren’t fairly advanced at both languages won’t notice that it still makes many mistakes. That has led to a lot of people having the misguided belief that it is “perfect.” What are seeing is probably the results of DeepL.
What you mean is – your students are submitting things online, and when you view their answers through a browser, the browser is automatically translating them between Japanese/English?
Or are some of your students so dense that they thought if they wrote their answers in Japanese and used the browser translator, that it would stay translated when they submitted it?
If the former, you can turn the browser translator off in the settings.
If the latter, lmao. Tell your students that Bing’s translator is pure garbage.
It’s the latter, but what I fear is that they’re writing in English but something is translating to (or trying to translate to) Japanese when they submit.
I actually saw precisely this phenomenon.
It was even with a question type where they need to highlight words in the question.
e.g. (not at all my actual question). Highlight the color word: The red dog ate oranges.
Only possible choices to click are: the, red, dog, ate, oranges. It should’ve been impossible to answer it in Japanese for that reason.
But someone answered = 赤い