Monday 30 July 2012

Post #5

Online translators can often be very humorous. I think it is best that students don’t use online translators, except for individual words. Using an electronic dictionary for Japanese can be very useful, and there are even entire phrases that appear underneath the definitions that students can use, but the result of translating sentences in language translators is too often awkward or strange to merit allowing students to use them. Moreover, as I am not a native speaker of Japanese but a student of Japanese who has studied it for a long time, there are many instances where I will not be able to decipher the subtleties of meaning in the translations, thus looking somewhat unknowledgeable in front of my students. I think it is best for me to ask my students to, for the most part, practice only the grammar and vocabulary used in class. Expanding a little bit is okay, but there is not much learning go on when students just plug English sentences into translators. Many of them just want to get out of doing their work.

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