Technology Tips: Use Google to Translate a Webpage

As you all know from studying foreign languages, translating from a foreign language into English is not easy! There is no perfect computer solution for this problem. It is possible, however, to get some help from a computer. Even if the computer cannot provide you with a perfect translation (in fact, the translations are far from perfect and sometimes very funny), you can use a computer translation to get a general idea what a foreign language webpage is talking about. For this Technology Tip, you will use the Google Language Tools to translate an Italian webpage into English.

Step One: Google Language Tools. You will start by going to the Google Translate page.

Step Two: Translate page. To translate something, you can just cut-and-paste the text into the box OR you can paste in the address of a webpage. So, open up a new browser tab, and try an Aesop's fable in Italian; the fables are listed in the left-hand menu here: Italian Aesop's Fables. After you click on a specific fable, copy and paste the text of the fable into the left-hand box on the Google Translate page.

Step Three: View results. After you click on the "Translate" button, you will see the results. There should be a story in English - not in very good English admittedly, and with some Italian words here and there, but you should be able to get the main idea of the story. (I chose Italian-English as the sample, because it is one of the more successful language pairs for machine translation.)

To finish up, create a blog post. For this Tech Tip, you need to create a blog post with the title: Google Translate. Write a sentence or two with your impression of the translation (does it make sense as a story?) and also paste in the text of the translated story below your comments. Here's my sample blog post. You might want to use the "Tech Tip" label so you can keep track of all your Tech Tip posts.  

When you are done, you can enter this tip on your GoogleDocs Checklist and then do the Gradebook Declaration for Extra Credit. Here is the text of the Gradebook Declaration you will complete:

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