Job Discussion Forums

[LongShiKong]

Any thoughts, experience with machine translation?

I've used Google Translate with an adult class as it would provide instant translations of words they didn't know and rank definitions by frequency use.

Here's Wikipedia's entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_machine_translation_applications

[fluffyhamster]

There are some threads by Victor Mair over on Language Log that discuss (among other things) translating back and forth between Chinese and English using Google Translate. There might also be something on Chinese-forums.com .

[LongShiKong]

Thanks for the leads, fluffyhamster. After reading Victor's blogpost, I tried it myself on the web-based translators--not much of a difference in terms of accuracy. :

[LongShiKong]

As long as we're comparing machine translation between Chinese and English, might as well include Baidu Translate::

[Jbhughes]

I teach Vietnamese students and prepare translations for certain scenarios using Tra tu, an Eng-Viet and Viet-Eng online dictionary (actually there are other languages on there, too). It seems to have more examples and be more accurate than google translate and the other popular dictionary Vdict. I usually translate the results back into English to find the best fit and sometimes throw out translations if there doesn't seem to be a decent match. I check translations with VN staff or teachers when I'm unsure.

Sometimes I've used google translate during my daily life as well as a dictionary on my phone. I've had quite entertaining conversations with people using google translate in shops (often when I don't want them to realise that I can actually speak VNese) and in places where I don't know any of the vocabulary (getting my bike repaired, for example). The times when I've used google translate are usually funny because it requires one's knowledge of 'Vietglish' to understand the translations.

W.r.t to the scenarios where I will translate words, I like to translate some of the tougher grammatical terms or headings when the sts are learning grammar, as I feel this focuses the sts more on the grammar itself, rather than the distractions of some word that they will likely never use in conversation. An example of which would be when teaching the use of 'be+going+to' for future intentions, I would translate 'intention'.

What I like about the use of occasional translation is the speed and, meanings of Vietnamese words and English words withstanding, the lack of ambiguity. I tend to steer clear of translating target language or anything where the meaning can be reliably extrapolated from a picture, action, sound or from context. This is all tempered by the level of the sts and their listening abilities.

I do find that translation can be a double-edged sword and I'm careful to encourage the sts to talk to me in English. One of the main problems I face is where sts have had all of their language instruction in L1 and even the tiniest snippet of L2 has been gobbled up and translated into L1. Certainly I don't want to exasperate the problem!

Here's how google translate handles VNese: