Let’s get this straight, any students of any age who are doing writing activities **will** use machine translation to try to do their work, with the exception of the most confident students and students who are “goody two-shoes” types.
I’m sure we’ve all seen students using Google Translate on their Chromebooks in class or turning in essays full of machine translated nonsense. Also often I see students using uncommon words or words they couldn’t possibly pronounce. These students, simply put, are *not learning anything*.
Instead of telling them they aren’t allowed to use it (they will not listen to this, they’ll just try to use it in secret), how can we promote responsible use of translation software or even discourage its use completely?
13 comments
Restrict tablet useage.
Hello everyone, today we won’t be using the tablets do please put them away.
It’s hard to stop students completely, but one thing that can slow them down a little is making it so they can’t copy and paste from the documents they’re reading (take snapshots of articles, paste text as pictures in documents, etc..). Obviously they can just type into the translator but it will make things a lot more tedious for them.
On the flip slide, I encourage the usage of it. There recently was an excellent [workshop at JALT](https://jalt.org/event/matsuyama/22-02-20) that talked about embracing it. It radically changed how I teach my advanced writing courses, and my students are writing at a much higher level & proficiency than before. (And no, they aren’t completely translating their essays into English.)
I highly recommend reaching out to that presenter for continued discussion.
You could make an activity where they have to come up with advantages/disadvantages of machine translation and when it should/shouldn’t be used. I expect they realise themselves what the problems are with it (especially in spoken communication) but just do it out of laziness or because they lack strategies for dealing with gaps in their language. Some students can be a bit preoccupied with correctness as well.
I find my students don’t do it in class but do depend on it for homework. All you can do is set expectations and sell them on why they should meet them.
It’s been mentioned, but it needs echoing.
Do *not* try to restrict its use or of the tech devices that students have daily access to anyway. This will fail, it will likely backfire, and you will have missed a chance to teach students how to properly use machine translation as a tool rather than a crutch.
This is a huge rabbit hole in the philosophy of education of language and how language actually functions ‘in the wild’ so to speak, but there is no such thing as “ownership” of words. The knee jerk problem most teachers have with the idea of machine translation is “those are not your words, you didn’t write that”, but if a student translates, then edits, then memorizes those words… do they not become the students? That’s how language is actually acquired, no one is out there re-inventing the wheel all alone reverse engineering the syntax of auxiliary verbs until they get it right, they’re just copying someone else’s use until it becomes their own.
So teach them how to efficiently use translation, its weaknesses, and how to rephrase and paraphrase off of a raw translation into something level appropriate that’s comprehensible to the student as well as the target audience.
Get a well written Japanese paragraph. Translate it on Google Translate into English. Finally, put the weird English back into Google Translate and translate it back to Japanese. Put the paragraphs side by side and ask which one was written by a machine. It’s incredibly obvious. I did it a few years ago and they understood quite well.
The issue that needs to be tackled beforehand is the fact that most students fresh from high school do not know how to write basic sentences that accurately represent their thoughts without major errors. Basically, in spite of some students memorizing complex words, sentences, or even whole speeches, their foundational knowledge is so lacking that they do not know how to see the structures in the sentences they have meticulously memorized, and thus can’t form new sentences that express other ideas with similar sentence patterns.
It seems that most teachers here expect students to learn English in classrooms through immersion or naturalization through no Japanese policies, but for any average ability student who has not grasped basic sentence structures, class time is far too little to expect any meaningful amount of natural learning, thus these students have little choice but to use machine translation.
I very much disagree with the sentiment one user here wrote regarding memorizing correctly translated sentences, primarily for the reason stated above, but also that for the average student, their memorized sentences often leave out words that lead to consequences such as completely changing the meaning of the sentence. They need to understand basic structures first to understand the ramifications of various mistakes.
The issue above can’t be resolved at a national level due to a number of issues, one being that the nature of secondary level English education, but also, and more dire, the hardheadedness of existing native English teachers. Most native English teachers don’t try hard enough to learn Japanese, and thus fail to provide the basic necessities of a fruitful teacher-student relationship: communication, feedback, advice, discipline, etc. These teachers also don’t understand why certain errors are common because they don’t themselves understand the sentence structures in Japanese that students are making before translating into English (in their heads or machine translation). So with insufficient practice making original sentences, these students will not learn, and their time/money is merely being wasted. The heavy reliance of machine translation will therefore stay.
What can you do? In the individual classroom level, you can create your own activities that ensure students gain foundational knowledge of sentence structures, after which you can proceed to the paragraph level. I’ve made my own textbooks. I study Japanese. In my above average level classes, students who follow my instructions and homework can make paragraph style spontaneous speeches (no chance for machine translation for they have only a minute to prepare) by the end of the semester regarding topics such as alternative energy.
In my ultra low level classes at a bottom tier university, there are students who start the semester struggling to read, and then by the end of the semester, can engage in spontaneous conversation through variations of question–>answer+details–>comment+details–>follow up questions pattern. There is no practice of memorizing dialogs.
My methodology is not the only methodology. There are many. But if all you do is ask students to write a paragraph/essay or dialog without ensuring they have grasped sentence structures (let alone paragraph/essay structure) and experience in making original sentences, then of course they’re going to use machine translation.
I do want to point out that machine translation is useful for understanding something, but I hold the opinion that it should never be used for sentence creation, let alone paragraph/essay creation. I vehemently disagree with the idea of letting students use machine translation and then giving them the responsibility of checking for mistakes as pointed it by others here. That activity should only be used in extremely high level classes in which the students’ goal is to become translators. In terms of Bloom’s hierarchical learning goals, evaluation is amongst the last milestones, so why jump to evaluating machine translation when most students don’t even know how to spot their own errors, let alone make accurate original sentences?
So again, basically, all students will have no choice but to use machine translation, unless you provide them the opportunity to gain a foundational sentence writing and then a paragraph writing skill set.
They said the same things about calculators in the 70’s.
Couldn’t do long form math if my life depended on it.
Retired educator, kids copying the answers in the back of the book to complete their assignments, good.
The alternative is an incomplete or nothing to hand in.
It might not be what YOU want, but their life isn’t one class, they have priorities and this week, English wasn’t one of them. But at least they are engaging with the language.
With the speed and accuracy of handheld translators, I see all languages eventually becoming “solved” in the same manner we have become comfortable “solving” math.
We speak a language in order to communicate our thoughts and wishes.
Ultimately, how we accomplish this exchange becomes unimportant.
My teacher had us actively use a few different machine translations to reach us where it’s accurate and where it isn’t, and it’s been very beneficial to me
If used responsibly, it can be a great tool for learning, but I would recommend showing them [DeepL](http://www.deepl.com) instead of Google Translate; it’s a way more accurate machine translator for Japanese/English
I know some teachers who have their students write in a Google Doc or something similar so that they, the teacher, can see the student’s progress and look for anything suspicious like a whole paragraph suddenly appearing out of nowhere. The problem with that is that students will get wise to the fact that they’re being watched and will just translate one sentence at a time.
What kind of graded written work do you assign? If you really want to make sure they aren’t using MT for graded work, make the graded work something like timed in class writing. You could have students write something over the space of one or two class periods and collect and hold their papers between classes.
I have my writing classes do several drafts of any graded work. I also place a heavy emphasis on explaining in writing. It doesn’t matter if their grammar is perfect. If they haven’t completely answered the prompt and have ignored my revision suggestions, their grade is going down, MT be damned. I don’t know if this cuts down on machine translation but…maybe, for writing, we just have to accept its usage. It’s a philosophical question.
In the real world, when students engage in written communication with lab mates, professors, foreign colleagues, and others in English, they *will* have the time to compose their thoughts in their L1 and then run it through MT. Writing isn’t “on the spot” like speaking.
When you think of it that way, why should we focus so much on making sure that every single sentence on the page was wrung out of the student’s brain when, as others have pointed out, students lack the basic foundational skills to do something as simple as start their sentences with capital letters? This is at the university level.
Ask them if they know what it is.
Show them what it is.
Show them how to use it. (Perhaps a single word translation)
Show them not how to use it. (Take a passage from their textbook and let them choose any language, or let them write their own words.)
Put it through Google Translate or whatever, and then back translate into their native language.
Foreign language studies isn’t about nouns, verbs, and grammar.
University writing teacher here. I make it part of an assignment early in the semester for writing courses. They must translate a Japanese text by submitting two paragraphs: one that they write on their own and one that was created with DeepL. Then I ask them to highlight the words and grammar structures that are new to them in one color, and highlight any mistakes or unintended words/sentences in another color. I purposely put some words in a few parts of the original Japanese text that will create unnatural or ambiguous translations.
Machine translation isn’t going away. The key is to teach students that if they are going to use it, they a) need to check that the text means what they want it to mean, and b) can use machine translation as a tool to improve their vocabulary and grammar.