Crossover vs. Computer (Spanish Teacher vs. Online Translators)

At my school middle school students have Google accounts through the school, and access to chromebooks. Although I consider myself to be pretty tech savvy, this is the first time I've been at a Google school and the first time my students have really had reliable access to technology. Overall that's a huge benefit - there are so many amazing digital tools available for both teachers and students. However, learning to use them productively and responsibly has been a learning curve for all of us. As a language teacher, I've had to balance the benefits of these digital tools with the strong temptation of one tool in particular - Google Translate. When beginning students hit the wall of their language limitations, it's easier to take the easy way out. Last year I dealt with many individual cases of students using online translators, and I realized I needed to be more proactive this year.

This year I made sure I included a note about online translators on my syllabus, and explained that for language learners this is a form of academic dishonesty.

However, I wanted to go deeper than that. Beginning language learners turn to easy shortcuts like Google Translate because it's quick, but because it seems like a viable solution when they can't produce the language they want. To all appearances the computer knows more language than they do. However, even a beginning learner will make different errors than a computer. I wanted to show students the awkwardness of computer translation, and why it's pretty easy to spot.

To do this, I found songs that had been released in English and in Spanish - Perdón by Enrique Iglesias & Nicky Jam and Tengo tu Love by Sie7e. (Links are to PDFs that I used.)I gave students a side by side comparison of some of the verses: the Spanish version, the English version, and a Google translation of the Spanish into English.

I asked students to examine each set of lyrics and think about which lines were translated awkwardly by Google Translate, and what changes the artist made so the lyrics worked better in a new language (or new culture.) Songs are a great way to highlight why exact translation sounds clunky. "Ricky Martin's got the looks" is catchier than the literal "Ricky has cute face," and sometimes crossover artists leave some simple lines untranslated - because eso no me gusta, eso no me gusta just sounds better!

The students had fun with this activity and it was a great way to talk about translation with them. As they were working on their pen pal letters over the following days, I overheard several encouraging comments.

"No, don't use Google Translate! Dude, we just did a whole activity about this!"

Any other fun examples of awkward translations? Here's an interesting news article about a Spanish town's reliance on Google Translate that got very awkward (though I'm not quite ready to go into that vocabulary realm with my middle school students.)

Side note: I had the chance last week to go to ACTFL here in San Diego, which was great.. but even after a whole week of break I haven't managed to finish processing the massive amount of ideas, notes, questions, resources and professional connections from the conference. More on that later!