Google Translate and DeepL: Blessing or Curse?
Towards a (more) sensible use of translation software in language teaching
With increasing tendency, many language instructors perceive a marked improvement in the quality of their learners’ written texts. When reading texts that are unusually good, instructors may raise the question as to whether these were written by the student alone. Reasons for such doubts may include: The text does not match the particular language level, some words sound inappropriate or even antiquated, or the sentence does not conform to the rules of the target language. Often the use of machine translation tools is the driving force here – but the question remains as to how these tools work and what they can (not) do. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we want to take a critical look at the development of translation tools such as Google Translate and DeepL and discuss ways in which such tools can best be used for language learning. We will analyze different practical examples across various languages and discuss which strengths and obvious weaknesses these translation tools (still) have. The overlying goal of this workshop is to offer practical recommendations for the use of translation tools in the language classroom and towards language learning in general, so that teachers and learners will be able engage with these tools more explicitly and critically in the future.
Please contact us if you are interested in this workshop.