As many of you know, I
am currently a college student who is hoping to study three languages at the
college level, which is a huge undertaking. There are times in which I wonder
whether or not I will be able to understand a passage well, or read an entire
novel in a foreign language without stumbling across too many unknown words. Thankfully,
Google has a feature called Google Translate that has helped me make this
transition much smoother and easier.
Before I explain how I
specifically use Google Translate, I want to mention that it is by no means an
application on which you should always rely. It will not always give you
correct translations and sometimes creates more communication barriers and
confusion than it will help you. On that note, if you keep this in mind and know
how to use it wisely, it can be very useful throughout your language-learning
journey. In my experience, Google Translate has been most accurate in Romance
languages, specifically in Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, and has
been very inaccurate in German. In most cases, when I use it for Russian, I can
get an overall gist of what a paragraph or sentences mean.
How exactly do I use
Google Translate to help me learn languages? This semester, I have used it to
look up individual words, idiomatic expressions, and to type up full sentences
to try and decipher overall meanings. If you need to look up words, it will
give you most translations of them in bold, along with their synonyms. If you
are wise and look at all of the words below the bolded words, you can easily
tell which translation is the one that conveys the meaning closest to the word
of you which you are thinking. Keep in my that online dictionaries that are
made in the countries of your target languages will most likely be more
accurate; however, Google Translate will help you in this regard most of the
time.
Not all idiomatic
expressions will be translated with this application, but most of the commonly
used, everyday expressions will be translated correctly (I can testify to this
because I am a native Spanish speaker, and have been impressed by its ability
to provide you with correct translations of expressions that cannot and should
not be directly translated from one language to another). Using Google
Translate to translate full sentences or paragraphs can get messy, but it is
possible. This semester, I have already had to translate many sentences from
French, Italian, and Russian to English, and have found it a lifesaver. I often
use this application to double-check the general meanings of sections of
readings and to make sure that I am understanding the majority of what I read,
as opposed to guessing and solely relying on my memory for comprehension.
Another important
question to ask is: When do you know when you can trust Google Translate as
opposed to when it causes you more harm than good? Generally speaking, you
should have a good enough grasp on a language to know what sounds and is grammatically
correct. Whenever I am in doubt, I type a sentence on Google in quotes to
verify if it exists and if it used in my target language. For example, if I want
to know how to say “thank you for your help” in Spanish, Google Translate
translates it as “gracias por tu ayuda.” If you type up “gracias por tu ayuda”
in quotes, many results will show up on Google in a matter of seconds, which
confirms that it is correctly translated. If you know that a translation is
incorrect, or is far from the actual translation by simply reading the
translation that it provides, try looking up individual words or phrases by
using trusted online language dictionaries, or by using the above method.
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