Google Translate Is Not The Answer!

I wrote this personally because of my experiences in teaching English. I am an English tutor who always motivates my students to enrich their vocabulary and improve their grammar with various method. When I came to the classes, I tried to do the warming up before tasting the materials. Starting with a very simple conversations, I attempted to incite their interests.


Tutoring senior high school student in Indonesia is not really 100% difficult. The thing is they do not like English as the important subject. So, whenever the translation exercises come, they take it for granted. They have their gadget to use Google Translate easily. It is fine if they use it for word-to-word, but in fact, they have put all of the paragraphs. Copy the paragraph to Google Translate, and paste it back to their assignment paper.


I have been teaching since 2011. Teaching in many schools and English courses, meeting students in large quantities, and meet many English teachers to discuss our student's problem, but still... it is like this is Indonesian's students behaviour. They tend to be lazy and hard to spur their own selves to be better.



How accurate and reliable is Google Translate?


According to Wikipedia, Google Translate is a free multilingual machine translation service, developed by Google, to translate text, or even a picture. This is actually the answer for us to learn languages, but it makes students lazy to think.


In grammar and translation section, I had ever banned the use of gadget in my classes, the result is their sentences is grammatically wrong and they were frustrated during doing the test.


Then, when they had their gadget in next English test. They seemed very confident and think, "Yeay! Google Translate is fucking awesome! What a promising application! My teacher would be so proud of me". Wait, what!? Stop right there! When I corrected their sentences, "The pronoun is wrong, the tense is wrong, the word order is wrong, the diction is wrong, bla bla bla".


WHY?


According to Google's own test, the accuracy of the translation depends on the languages translated. The test requires mother-tongue language speakers to assess Google Translate within 0 to 6 scale. The impressive rating is 5.43.


Language is a developing system with intricacy. Google Translate is easy to convert English to French since these two languages are sharing so much. What if other languages that requires a greater jump? Even some languages have lower rate in the test because of their compexity.


Quoting an information from www.quora.com, The British Medical Journal (BMJ) reviewed Google Translate’s ability to perform language translations in a paper titled, “Use of Google Translate in Medical Communication: Evaluation of Accuracy” and found the accuracy of translating medical documents to be less than 58% with some errors being potentially life threatening.



So What's The Answers?


1. Love and Learn English Steadfastly


This is a must for us to be a better student. Gadget is okay, Google Translate is okay, using it for study purpose is okay but we have to remind to ourselves that improving our skill in languages is far more serious and important than just use it for only achieving high score. You will regret it like my graduated student did.


2. Know Grammar and Vocabulary


Having a good skill in grammar is the point for you to use Google Translate, you can easily realize which sentences are wrong. Having rich vocabulary is also important because you are able to know the acceptances of vocabulary. You cannot use all of the vocabulary arbitrarily without knowing the contextual meaning.



As a final point, translation machine is an awe-inspiring invention that human made, but do not let it cosset you too much. Language is a difficult and subtle thing which can be learnt by practicing every single day. Google Translate is OK! Makes you lazy to study? THAT'S NOT OK!






Sastra Noor