Online translation is quite different from traditional translation. I note the tools I am using: Google Translator Toolkit (you need a gmail account to get on), Google Translator in two forms, Leo, the online dictionary containing a grammar site, dictionary definitions, and a corpus that I am using, and http://www.google.de (to see how certain words and phrases are used when embedded in text). Searches also take me to synonym dictionaries and even images on German and English websites. I could even envision using German Youtube. So, unlike a translator in the past, I have much more than my knowledge and my dictionaries of various kinds and my thesaurus at hand. I have those, as well as all these other tools. (And I know that there are even more tools available to which I’ve been exposed, but which I do not yet use.)

But what am I learning? I am learning what Google, for example, offers when one types a word into the search engine: more words, more phrases, depending on how you enter it. Take the word ‘Hospiz,’ for example (‘hospice’). I type the word in Google, and I get phrases (Hospizbewegung, Hospizarbeit, Hospize, Hospiz Stuttgart), but I note if I type in Hospizd,’ I get words like ‘Hospizdienst’ (‘hospice service’), whereas if I type ‘Hospiz d’ I get phrases like ‘Hospiz Detmold’ (‘hospice in the city Detmold’).

I note when I’m translating my short story from English into German, that I’m changing it as I go. I feel very free, since I am the original author of the English version. But I also think of things that never occurred to me when writing the English original, things like the fact that Germans would not easily say ‘I love you’ to their doctor as they were dying, but at the same time I can imagine that they might, if they were in the state that many patients seem to arrive at, if they are not on machines: an unusual state of bliss that transcends some cultural customs. Even in the U.S. people don’t normally tell their doctors “I love you,” but in the German culture, I would think that norms of respectful distance would even more strongly come into play here.

So when I’m translating, I actually address that, and thus I translate it to say: “I love you, Dr. Gomez. One wouldn’t normally say that. But that didn’t matter. She could. She did, because a deep feeling of well-being flooded her soul.” (I notice that even as I’m translating back into English I’m changing the English to accommodate the slight differences in the German from the original! It can become a never-ending loop of meaning making!) The other issue is the title, not ‘Dr. Gomez,’ as in the U.S., but ‘Herr Doktor Gomez’ (‘Mr. Dr. Gomez’), which has an even more formal feel, a feeling of distance, rank, and respect, which would make saying “I love you” even more profound.

I notice when I’m translating that I’m thinking of sentence length (probably partly because of Pete Smith’s words in his localization/translation course I’m a part of). In the original the sentences are often short. There are many sentence fragments. And I’m reminded that standard formal German sentences can tend to be quite long. And yet this is a short story. And sometimes short stories contain shorter sentences, but often to obtain a certain effect. It got me to thinking about whether formatting my translation like a prose poem might more successfully convey the tone I’m trying to effect.

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts I’m having as I’m translating. The tools are wonderful. They really help non-native speakers, maybe even native speakers, easily get beyond the starting point and save a lot of time looking up words that one has in one’s passive repertoire (so one knows it’s appropriate), and words that one thinks might work and that get one looking in the right direction for the appropriate word. After that it does take some time rewriting what the machine translator has written, but time has been tremendously saved on the first go round. I find not only am I thinking about syntax and vocabulary on the sentence level, but I’m thinking about tone, about cultural meanings of words, syntax, length, and I’m thinking about impact on the reader.

I also realize how my knowledge and background in German are helping me out. It goes more slowly when I’m working on French, for I have to question more.

As we go into the future, I think we will begin changing our minds about translation tools on the internet. Right now, as educators we’re afraid of their abuse by students as tools for cheating. As we become more knowledgeable about them ourselves, I foresee teaching students how to use them effectively and productively from the beginning. If they know how to use these tools, they will be able to access information and ideas from around the world in many languages. If they know the limitations as well as the freeing aspects of these online tools, they will be better able to navigate ideas and information in other languages. Just as we teach students how to “read” language in literary texts, in oral discourse, in prose discourse of various non-literary kinds, we will, I believe, in the future teach students how to critically “read” machine translation.

We are still at the point that calculators were a few decades ago: we do not allow them in the classroom. But as we finally realized with calculators, they can be a very useful tool and serve our needs. I use one every time I want to know how much money I have left in the bank! Our goal: to keep every single student, even the one who takes one semester of foreign language, connected not only to cultures of the language we are teaching, but, even more, to the world’s cultures.

This reminds me, once again, of Father Guido Sarducci’s “Five Minute University,” and that is, essentially, what we are combating. (It’s wonderful, while sobering, because that is the mindset of many folks in our country, and I understand that mindset fully.) The “Five Minute University” was a comedy skit about university learning, first airing on “Saturday Night Live,” and it is an important comedy skit for me as an educator, for it reminds to take the long view, to remember all the students with whom I interact, and to ask myself: How can even one semester of a foreign language really and truly have a major beneficial impact on each and every student? How can we get beyond what people still say when we say we teach a language at the university: “Oh, I had Language X, and I don’t remember a thing”?

Wrapping back around to online translators: In the future this will be one way in which we will encourage students to stay connected to the non-native-language world. We will teach them not only how to applied their “critical reading” of literature to the web, but also how to use these translation tools to critically read the world and its cultures.

And my translation in the end? I left it in prose format. It just seemed to have longer sentences, too, that made it more like prose. And I thought of the short stories again and realized that the short sentences, the sentence fragments, as well as the longer fragments, created an acceptable tone and feel in prose format.

(You can access both versions of the story/vignette, the English and the German, at this blog.)