Should we use the electronic dictionaries or not?

[Ford]

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Hello,Everybody:

Haven't seen you for several days,how are you?Thanks for telling me the difference between form and forum.I remember it.

I will tell you about a recent situation in class. We met at our training room the day before yesterday.Jeff had a bad cold but not H5N1.Tracy was overtime working.So they were absent from the class.

Our first task was to look at the leaflet which came with a clock our teacher had bought on board a flight with our Airline. Our teacher said he just could not follow the translated English and set the clock at the correct time or set the alarm. Our teacher is always telling us not to use the electronic dictionaries and we would be better using English-English dictionaries.

Teacher is always producing examples of how difficult it is to try and find straight translations Chinese to English and how it produces quite silly and bizarre statements. A good example is to see what Google does to a Chinese Minister's speech.(use google auto translate)

The clock is sold on the airplane.The instructions has two languages-Chinese and English.Teacher says he can't use the clock when following the instructions.So we translate it paragraph by paragraph and one by one. We are all confused by the poor translation.

The word "inquiry" is used for a heading but this does not make sense. We discuss this word use it to illustrate the difficulties associated with learning the English language. Although inquire and enquire can be used similarly the word "inquiry" is a formal word often used by government,police and for some formal legal issues.The instructions should not use this word.

From our teacher's opinion,maybe the translator has no previous knowledge of the word.You look for it in the dictionary.The e-dictionary cannot show you the difference between inquiry and other words.It just tell you the meanings of the word.So you will be wrong.

The teacher is making the point that having lived here for two years he sees such silly or bad English on safety instructions shop windows menus general attempts at translation It's maybe the disadvantage of the e-dictionary. But I think some software can avoid this.We should use English thinking to translate the Chinese to English.After all ,they have different history.

Do other people notice that the e-dictionary makes them make translation mistakes? I would welcome general comments so I can discuss the matter in class.

Best Regards,

Ford[[/b]

[Shannongcole]

Hi Ford,

Thank you for your comments. In my opinion, online tools such as translators and dictionaries are very useful....but only as tools! I also am of the opinion that they cannot be relied on for a true translation of language. I have to admit, I do use Google Translate for my website for the benefit of visitors whose level of English would not allow them to otherwise understand the text on the page. This permits some students to get the basic description of the material. At the same time, I realize that the translation will not be 100% correct, and several sentences or words will provide an incorrect or non-sense translation.

I do have an interesting story to share. I also speak Spanish, and once worked as an ESL teacher in a public school in the U.S. One teacher was sending home a letter for a student's parents. The normal procedure was, of course, to let someone who knew Spanish to compose the letter. However, this teacher thought she could save time by simply translating the letter instantly in one of those online translators (I don't recall if it was Babelfish, Google, or something else). To make a long story short, she did find me in the hallway and gave me a copy of the letter (she had already printed another copy for the student) and asked me to check it. So, I shrugged my shoulders and began reading it aloud, translating each sentence back into English.

"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Idiots," I began. Her face turned white and jaw dropped. She stopped me and asked me if she just heard me say, "idiots." I confirmed this. You see, the last name of this student was "Morones" and unfortunately this was seen as "moron", and the e-translator simply translated it into Spanish (I believe it was actually stronger, and the Spanish word chosen was "imbecil".) She ran toward the room, took the note away from the student, and told him she'd send home another message tomorrow instead.

The moral of this story is to never solely rely on instant, automatic translation for real communication. Online dictionaries and translators are helpful for tools, but are certainly no replacement for human beings. In my opinion, since language is so closely connected to the reality of being human (with new slang, expressions, definitions and uses appearing each year), I doubt if technology will ever be able to get a 100% rate of AI translation.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Shannon Cole
coleinstitute.com