Thing # 12 Rummaging around Google

            Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/) is an amazing application!  I can see it being a useful tool when traveling around different countries.  It is certain easier than lugging around a translation dictionary. 

            I started out by testing the function with simple German sentences to see if it was accurate. 

“I must drive to the store to buy milk.” --- translated into, “Ich muss in den Laden fahren, um Milch zu kaufen.” (Perfect translation)

“My brother hit me with a soccer ball yesterday and it left a mark.” --- translated into, “Mein Bruder schlug mich mit einem Fuβball gestern und es links eine Markierung.” (Good translation, but a few mistakes)

I tried a few more lengthy and complicated sentences and the translations were fairly decent, but corrections needed to be made in order for it to be grammatically correct.  Many of the translation mistakes were due to literal interpretations of the words.  For example, using the sentence from above – left translated into links.  While this is technically correct, the German word that should be used here is different.  Even though there were minor errors, I can still see this being a great application to use.

I am happy though that it was not around when I was teaching German so many years ago.  I can easily see students using this function to cheat in order to help translate their work.  It could be very tempting to just copy and paste the homework assignment into the translation section and have it do the heavy lifting.  The student would just have to clean it up.  Modern language teachers will surely have to keep this in the back of their minds when correcting assignments.

The second Google application I tried was Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en) .  My husband has this and it drives me crazy!  He has it set to his favorite sports teams and a few work related sites.  That “Ping” sounds is constantly going off.  And of course, no matter what is going on, he will check it.  It is not just him though.  I constantly see people checking their phones when it ‘pings’.  Google must have been channeling Ivan Pavlov when they invented this application.  This is a sore subject with me, so I will not digress anymore.  In all seriousness though, the application is a great tool to use because you can set up your own parameters.  You can narrow the updates down from ‘as it happens’ to ‘once as day’; you can have it filter from multiple sources or just a few specific ones; and it can send general or best results.  This would be especially good for teachers because they could treat it like RSS feeds and have class projects and assignments that center around current information that is happening around them.