Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Translate Tutorial”.
In this article, we’re gon na look at a tool made by Google that really facilitates communication between people that don’t speak the same language and I’m going to be showing this. From the point of view of a teacher. Having said that, Google Translate is usable in the business world and in many other settings, and so whether you’re a teacher or a student or not doesn’t matter, you should still be able to learn. The basics of using Google. Translate first thing I’ll say, is Google Translate? Is not at all a perfect tool, it’s not going to create perfect Spanish, perfect, French.
Whatever language you would like to translate into it’s, not gon na create perfect text for you, but it is a really good tool. So, let’s get started now, Google Translate you’ll notice. The address translate.google.com and you can just go there without being signed into your account, although it is a little bit nicer if you are signed into a Google account. But if not, that’s fine just go to translate google.com and then there’s a number of different ways that you can use this service to do some translation for you.
If you just want to translate a word or two just go ahead and type. The word that you know into the space at the left so I’ll just click there to make sure it’s selected and I’ll type in a word in English. Now it senses that this is English, so I can just click there where it says English and in this case it translated it into Spanish. Now, if Google Translate automatically selects the wrong language for you, you can just click to switch to the language you wanted it to translate from and also the language you wanted it to translate to and notice.
If you click the drop down here, there is a huge list of most of the common languages around the world, and so you can very easily select a typical language that maybe your students might speak or that their parents might speak and you should be able to Get some help, at least on the word level notice that there’s even some kind of fun languages like Esperanto, which is pretty cool, but anyway, you also have a lot of the typical languages that are taught in school, like Japanese, French, Spanish, German and many others. Ok, so I’m just gon na select Spanish. Now with many of these languages, you can go ahead and click this symbol here to listen to the pronunciation of the word, so this can be very helpful in facilitating communication. Okay, let’s do another example, but this time longer, instead of hello, I’m just gon na write a full sentence.
I’M gon na type out. I read a lot of books that seems simple enough right and, as I typed Google Translate, did its best to translate what I typed laio muchos libros is what it translated it into now. That could be correct, but I wanted this to say. I read in the past tense a lot of books and that’s not what Google Translate put here.
This actually means I read a lot of books, and so, as with all translation, there are some pitfalls and some dangers. Sometimes Google Translate will get it exactly right, but other times, they’ll misunderstand what you’re trying to say in this case. It’S a common error, read and read, of course, are spelled the same way, and so it’s logical that Google Translate would have some trouble with that to help with the translations. There are some tools that you will be able to use.
For example, look underneath you’ll, see, see, also, suggestions and you’ll also see some definitions and things down here sometimes appear. For example, if I type in the word car in English and go for a Spanish translation of that notice, that it gives you basically a little dictionary translation dictionary that points out that the word car could actually be translated. Lots of different ways – and these are some of the variations that you’ll see there. So if I say el carro, that you know could be meant to mean a truck or a wagon or those kinds of things or I could go with coach, a okay, and so this can help clear up some of the confusion that naturally comes when you’re trying To translate into a another language, but also you can click on the translation, to edit it and to see alternate translations, so I’m going to click there, and you can see that these are some suggested other translations. That might be better for me, and in this case this one here is a a lot more in line with what I tried to type so I’m gon na click on that it changes the translation and even though word-for-word it’s not an exact translation like I say That really mirrors more what I wanted to say now, if you are bilingual, it is possible to actually improve the translation, so you can go in click and kind of teach. Google translate what they should have put there.
If you know better than what Google Translate has done, you can also just change your mind and click here to undo the edits. Ok, so that’s very useful for writing out sentences and translating them now, if you are signed in to your Google account some of the nice things that you can do are you can save your Google Translation to your account and you can also easily share it with Other people through email, Twitter or Google Plus, and so those are some nice features that you get. If you sign in to your Google account now another little tool that you get is the copy tool.
If you click copy, it highlights and copies your translations so that you don’t have to click and drag to highlight everything. It’S copied. It’S ready to be pasted into Microsoft, Word or Google Docs or some other tool so that you can send it off to people.
Ok, so we’ve looked at translation of single words or it could be one or two words and we’ve also looked at translation of a whole sentence and some of the possible complications, but also tools that you can use to help. You make sure you get the right translation, but let’s look at another problem that often comes up when it comes to communicating across languages, and that is what, if you don’t even know what the language is, that you’re looking at, but you want to translate it. So you can understand it.
Well, you can just type or paste a word in and sometimes it will automatically recognize it. Sometimes you can just click detect language, and you probably noticed also at the bottom. It thought that it was probably Dutch and it is, and then it translated it.
It looks like into Spanish I’ll change that back now to English and we’ve got our word now. Another couple of tools that you should be aware of in Google Translate can be found here at the left side of the page. You can turn on speech input if you click that you have to give Google access to your microphone, but you can allow that and then you could just speak the words and then they would be translated for you.
So that’s kind of fun. You can also turn on a virtual keyboard if you would like, so that could be helpful if you’re, using a smart board or other interactive whiteboard and there’s other reasons you might want to use that as well, and so Google Translate really is a nice useful tool For teachers for professionals, for students, for parents really for anyone that needs to communicate with someone that doesn’t speak their same language. I especially think it’s great for teachers, though, because in many cases a teacher will have five or six languages represented in their class or the parents of the students that are in their classes will speak.
You know five to ten different languages between them and it can be really hard to communicate about things like parent-teacher conferences, IEP s and field trips, and things like that and Google Translate gives teachers that possibility of hopefully being able to communicate with those parents. Speaking of things like field trip, permission slips and maybe class disclosure documents, and things like that, how could you translate a whole document? Well, you could click and drag to highlight the text of your document, copy paste it in and then copy and paste it back into your document, but in many cases there’s a better way and that’s this translated document, and here is what the document looks like that. I want to translate into English. This is what it looks like in Spanish.
This is the original and you can see it’s a very serious paper. That’S been written up about teaching math and this document is pretty complex, several different pages. So I wonder how well that’s going to translate: let’s give it a try, so I click translate a document choose file and I select the file open it and I just click, translate and then notice in the lower left corner. It’S giving me updates about the translation process right now.
It’S waiting for it to finish uploading and it then translates it and produces it for you to look at so here is the English translation of the document and I can browse down through it and let’s take a look at the results. It says from the point of view of the teaching of mathematics the above reflections: they must be realized at the age and knowledge of students. We cannot propose same problems, a mathematician and adult a teenager or a child, because their needs are different. Now is that perfect, English? No, that’s not perfect English, but do I understand the gist of that paragraph? Yes, I do, and so I hope that helps you see that Google Translate, while not perfect, really can be very useful.
Let’S try it again this time. I’Ve got a different document, it’s the Gettysburg Address and, let’s see how well that gets translated. Now, you’ll notice. The mistake I just made, I haven’t changed the selected languages, and so it says this documents already in English. So I need to change it and say this document is gon na go from English into Spanish and upload the document again and you can see there’s the Gettysburg Address in Spanish. Now this ability to translate online becomes even more, I think, important and useful when considering languages that aren’t even based on the same alphabet. So, for example, I could translate into Chinese so I’ll, go from English into Chinese traditional and choose the same Gettysburg Address document. I’Ll click translate and there’s the Gettysburg Address in Chinese, so what a useful tool? This is one more example that I’d like to share with you, and that is, you can also use Google Translate to translate a website, so I’m gon na go here to a webpage. That’S in Spanish and because I am in Google Chrome, you’ll notice that it’s already recognizing that it’s a foreign language and it wants to know if I would like it to translate it right here.
But if you don’t always use Chrome, you may not get this every time you go to a website that you might want to translate. Okay, so, instead of showing you this method of just clicking, translate I’d like to show you the old-fashioned way, I guess of translating a web page, and that is to go up to the top click on the URL. You can just click once on any part of the URL and it highlights it and then copy that you could right click copy or use the keyboard short and then go back to Google Translate and paste in the URL. And you need to make sure it’s translating into the right language for you whatever that is, and then you can click the link and it takes you to a translation of the website. So again, even though Google Translate is not by any means perfect, I highly recommend it as a tool to help you communicate with students, maybe and with parents and co-workers and others that you might know that don’t speak the same language as you. So good luck using Google Translate thanks for watching and please consider subscribing to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students.
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