News and information for staff members and the Madison community
Vol. II No. 6 - April 10, 2007
In a school district as diverse as Madison, everyone is looking for the easiest way to provide our families equal access to important information. MMSD employs 79 Bilingual Resource Specialists who help facilitate this task in languages other than English. However, with increased demand comes the temptation to cut corners.
These days, online programs that promise free and fast translations of written texts are everywhere on the internet. Don't be fooled! These programs are generally unreliable and are no substitute for a thinking human being.
Beyond simple sentences, computer programs are bound to fall short. Machines do not have the ability to understand grammar and semantics, let alone idiom and nuance. For example, try asking one of these programs to translate a sentence from English to Spanish, and then have it translate that same phrase in Spanish back into English. You almost never get the same English sentence you started with.
Here are a couple of translation blunders I came across on the internet:
You can see how using these programs could cause a well-meaning person to end up in some uncomfortable situations!
The same danger exists even within programs MMSD students are already using in the schools. In our last issue of MMSD Today, we pointed out the helpful features of the program "Read, Write Gold." While this program may be wonderful tool for English speakers, its Spanish translation feature is an unfortunate disaster. When you click on a word in Spanish to have the program read it aloud, you hear a word that in no way resembles Spanish. Rather than help them identify the word, this might cause more confusion for a Spanish speaking student.
The bottom line is be cautious when it comes to translation programs. In the end, it never hurts to rely on good old-fashioned human input!
For more information about written translation services available in the district, please visit the Division of ESL and Bilingual Education on the dww and see our "Guidelines and Request Form for Written Translation."
Last Updated: Tue May 1 16:08:32 2007
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