Good grief, no! That would be my first reaction as a translator. There are so many amusing and indeed embarrassing examples of rubbish produced by this app. So, just to start with a bit of amusement, here’s an example: Google Translate claims that it can translate from language A to language B. However, in reality, it seems to go via a third language (undoubtedly English). The evidence: it makes complete mincemeat of formal vs familiar pronouns: German du/Sie, Russian ты/вы, Polish ty/Pan-Pani-Państwo-Panie, French tu/vous, Italian tu/lei, etc. and produces random output:
Hm.
So it’s totally useless then, is it?
Well, perhaps it depends what you want to do with it. When I wear my translator’s hat, I’d want to keep well away from it, and you can find some good reasons in my FAQ section under “Why can’t I use machine translation? It’s much cheaper!”
However, I’m not just a translator. I’m also a passionate language learner and linguist. So in this blog post I’d like to mention a few very good uses of Google Translate.
My two hobby languages (the ones I don’t offer professionally) are Polish and Mandarin.
First, Polish:
I sometime get asked: Don’t you get muddled with Russian and Polish? And the answer is: yes, I do. But there are ways to mitigate interference between the two languages. And this is where Google Translate can actually help – even though the underlying engine (as I mentioned earlier) seems to go via English.
Here’s an example. Google Translate can usually cope with simple phrases. Recently I learned the Polish phrase na domiar złego, … (“to make things worse, …”), but as soon as I’d internalised it, I realised to my discomfort, that I couldn’t come up with a Russian equivalent. I had a mental block. Without much optimism, I thought I’d try Google Translate, and – to my surprise – it came up with a good answer: Что еще хуже, … Admittedly, it might have provided some complete nonsense (as it often does!), but there it was, at the drop of a hat, nicely reminding me.
Another point is grammar. You can generally trust Google Translate to do well on grammatical endings, and so it doesn’t take long to have a few full parallel paradigms to look at in two related languages (here Russian and Polish) – nicely formatted, easy to copy and paste, and then beautifully available to enjoy and meditate upon. Here’s one of them: to swim: плавать, pływać, very kindly reminding me to watch out for the basic difference in stem vowels: a in Russian, and y in Polish. Hurray! I’m now less likely to suffer Russian interference next time I talk about swimming in Polish:
However, you do have to be careful, as this doesn’t always work perfectly. If for example, you leave out the pronouns (я, ты, он, …) in the Russian paradigms, then Google Translate produces something totally unhelpful:
Oh dear, oh dear!
Now let’s look at my second hobby language, Mandarin: Google Translate is actually very helpful with Mandarin phonetics and pronunciation, as the app produces not just a translation, but also Pinyin.
Pinyin is a system of rendering Chinese characters in Roman letters, and this includes four diacritics to represent the four tones of Chinese. These tones are vital in distinguishing meaning and therefore important for the learner. Get the tone wrong, and you end up saying something totally different! For instance 好 (hăo, tone rising and then falling) means “good”, and 号 (hào, tone falling) means “number”.
One major complication in learning Mandarin vocab is that words and phrases need to be listed not just twice, but three times: Mandarin, Pinyin and English. Google Translate may often produce a faulty translation, but it mostly produces correct Pinyin, as the correspondence between a Chinese character and its pronunciation is mainly one-on-one and therefore fool-proof for a computer program. Here’s an example:
It’s easy enough to copy “Cèsuǒ huì zài nǐ de zuǒbiān” and paste it into a list of phrases or into a flashcard app, such as Anki. Most importantly, the tone marks are nearly always perfect. This is far less time-consuming than adding the tone marks by hand.
When you look at the screenshot, you may notice a speaker icon. Click on it, and a dear robotic Google lady reads the sentence out to you in a native speaker’s synthesised voice – nicely, with all the correct tones. Obviously, this doesn’t beat a human being, but it’s helpful. She really does sound like a highly educated Chinese robot. And her colleagues in other languages are equally well educated.
The next point should be useful for absolutely any learner of any language. Although my example refers to Mandarin, the principle can be applied more widely.
You can use Google Translate to test your own pronunciation. Click on the microphone icon and say a sentence in the foreign language. If the resulting output is OK, congratulations! If the output is wrong, you need to work on your pronunciation a bit more.
Here’s an example of “garbage in – garbage out”:
厕所回在你的左边. Cèsuǒ huí zài nǐ de zuǒbiān.
What happened was that I mispronounced a word: I gave it the wrong tone: huí(2nd tone) instead of huì (4th tone), and this was reflected in the output. It should have been: 厕所会在你的左边。
It showed me that I had to practice a bit more, paying special attention to that one word, until I finally got the sentence right and Google Translate produced correct output 会(as shown in the screenshot above).
This can of course be applied to any language. Google Translate is a good tool for testing and perfecting your pronunciation of the foreign language when you don’t have a native speaker at hand.
But what about its use in translation (excluding any professional use, of course)? Well, it does actually come in quite handy for looking up the odd word or expression in an informal group context where not everyone speaks English perfectly. My wife and I run an international Bible study group with several Chinese students who find English a bit hard. A quick look at Google Translate on the iPad can be helpful. Occasionally Google Translate produces complete rubbish, but that quickly becomes obvious from the puzzled looks on people’s faces – and then we can all have a good laugh and try again, with a synonym. One important hint: treat it more like an online dictionary that offers suggestions, not so much as a phrase translator.
Here’s an example of output that would be usable in a Bible study context, especially as the app also suggests a few alternatives:
Finally, don’t miss this fun element:
Google Translate is brilliant with place names: Here are some examples of various place names translated into Chinese, but I’ve jumbled them up to give you a challenge. Can you work out which is which? Beware! One of them is NOT a phonetic translation and one of them is only partly phonetic. You’ll find the solution further down. To get the full enjoyment of these names, you’ll need to enter them into Google Translate and then click/tap the speaker icon to hear them pronounced.
| Częstochowa (Poland) | 克拉科夫 Kèlā kē fū |
| Henley on Thames (UK) | 第聂伯罗彼得罗夫斯克 Dì nièbóluó bǐdé luō fū sīkè |
| Kraków (Poland) |
慕尼黑 Mìníhēi |
| Leverkusen (Germany) |
考文垂 Kǎo wén chuí |
| München (Munich, Germany) |
泰晤士河畔亨 Tàiwùshì hépàn hēnglì |
| Днепропетровск (Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine) |
勒沃库森 Lēi wò kù sēn |
| Coventry (UK) |
琴斯托霍瓦 Qín sī tuō huò wǎ |
Solution: 1g, 2e, 3a, 4f, 5c, 6b, 7d
So, to sum up, Google Translate – though not a professional tool – can be put to good use for informal purposes, such as language learning (especially pronunciation practice), informal groups and a bit of entertainment, and these are areas where it can shine – as long as you don’t trust its output too much.
I’d be interested to hear if there are any other creative uses.