The Pains of Online Translators

This is a letter to my students and fellow teachers that they will never read.

Dear Students of English (or any language for that matter),

While using online translators for one or two words at a time is generally acceptable, using online translators to "translate" pages of the original language is not. You will end up with sentences like this, "I had you send it to a daddy to the place that you were up in the morning, and joined a family of the homestay future on the first day and met all of the school after a long absence." This may look, sound and smell like English, but it is not English. Your minds are much more capable of translating accurately than the internet is. Take a few minutes and do the translation yourself. Sure it is more work, but the outcome is better work that you can be proud of. Also your teacher will appreciate it.

When native speakers see sentences like the one above, they can immediately tell that you plugged the passage into the internet and had the internet do the work for you. Then, you did not even have enough respect for your teacher to read over the result of your venture and edit out the nonsense. No human being could come up with such mangled sentences as these without the aid of a robot. Not only is it insulting to your teacher to pass off shoddy, semi-plagiarized English translations but it is a shortcut that could start a dangerous precedent. As a student, the process of learning is just as, if not more, important than the final result. If you can recite all of the prepositions in the English language in alphabetical order but cannot use any of them properly, then what is the value?

Arguably who really cares about diary entries about a home stay in Australia translated into English? Though I was genuinely interested in reading about your opinions on the trip, that interest has been squelched by my inability to understand what you are trying to say. When I have to read the Japanese to understand what your English is attempting to convey, there is a serious problem.

The issue is that these actions, copy/paste translating and plagiarism in general, can cause a student to think it is okay to take shortcuts. Though I know many of you have no intention of furthering your education at a university level, the skills you learn in high school (flexibility, time management, intellectual honesty, and opinion formation and justification) directly relate to the way you interact with with world. These skills are essential for people in academia and the work force. When you take unnecessary shortcuts, you are only cheating yourself and disrespecting your teachers.

The more troubling aspect of this problem is the response of the teacher. If these actions are left unpunished then there is no hope for behavior modification in the student. We, as teachers, have to be willing to be the enemy in this situation and have the student correct his or her behavior. If we tacitly allow students to get away with behavior like this then what is purpose of teaching them English? Just give them a computer or a cell phone with internet access.

Sincerely,

Your frustrated teacher