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Why you should never use Google translate

  • Writer: Evelyn Newhouse
    Evelyn Newhouse
  • Jan 26, 2017
  • 3 min read

I always ask my students to refrain from using google translate and to do their own translation work. Not only is it cheating to let a computer do your homework, but the results are disastrous. Google Translate is unreliable because it lacks human understanding of language and its usage. It cannot be used as resource and is often used as a last minute desperate attempt to finish an assignment. Sometimes they listen and sometimes they do not and wonder how I could possibly have figured out that they have used google translate against their better judgement. The answer is easy, google translate will give you literal translations that do not make sense in the target language.

In the effort of explaining this concept to English speakers, I will use examples of German words translated into English. My first example is “Landstreicher”, the German word for vagabond. Google translate gives us a literal translation of the word “Land” as country and the noun “Streich” as trick. The google translation for “Landstreicher” is country trick. This translation is not useful and if I see a literal translation such as this, I will know that a student has made use of google translate.

The second example refers to the meme that I borrowed from http://emgn.com/entertainment/14-funniest-literal-translations-german-proverbs/. This has a photo of an elderly woman that is looking at a computer screen completely befuddled and the words read: I think I spider. Google translate only offers the translation of spider for the German word “spinne”. If the German word is capitalized it is a noun and the only possible translation is spider. However, if the word is lower case then it could either mean spinning, as in spinning yarn on a spinning wheel, or crazy. The proper way to translate the German saying “Ich glaube ich spinne.” is “I think I am crazy.”

Sometimes google translate does not even go into a literal translation but gives you a word that does not even exist in the English language. I typed in the German word for the painful cramp that you get when you laugh very hard “Lachkrampf”. Instead of taking the word “Lach” and translating it to “laugh” and the word “Krampf” and translating it into “cramp” which would give you a literal translation of “Laughingcramp” they gave the word “Lachrympathetic” as a definition. I did a few internet searches in a few dictionaries for the word “Lachrympathetic” and came up with nothing. This is not an English word!! Google translate, where did you get this word? Why do you want to mislead my students?

I also attempted the German word for porridge “Brei” in my google search and got free. I am not sure how this happened, maybe because the German word for free is “Frei” and it rhymes with “Brei”. Perhaps google translate should start alerting you to the fact that it is playing charades and warn you by saying “Rhymes with Frei” instead of just throwing it out there to mislead students.

In closing, I hope that you see my point why should never trust a computer to do your translation work. Not only will I catch you, but your work will not make any sense and yes it does take just as much work to process your writing with google translate as it does to use a dictionary and ask your teacher when things just get crazy.

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