Monday 30 July 2012

Making the most of online translators. Charlene Polio

This article reminded me some good times in College when I tried to translate through the internet some of the papers I was doing in English. I knew I was doing mistakes in English but it was even worse when I put my paper written in French and translated. One thing I realized is that if you write complicated sentences in your own language, worse it gets through translators!
I remember my English teachers trying to explain to me that I had "to think in English and not translate"... It is one of the hardest thing to do and honnestly, it takes years to accomplish.
I liked the different methods she uses to try to incorporate the translators into French lessons, they are inovative. Although, maybe that I am old school, but the translators should be restricted to word to word translation as we use a dictionnary.
It may be a good idea to see the differences between two languages and the structures.
Personnaly, the best method I got was from a German teacher, he told us to stay simple in our sentence construction: subject + verb + complement + dot. Even if you repeat yourself several times, it is alright. In time and practice, you can be able to evoluate and write bigger and more complicated sentences .
The Human mind is not a computer, we can associate things together intuitively and a machine cannot. It is for this reason that no matter how good a translator program can be, it will always make mistakes.

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