Wikipedia /Machine Translation

Wikipedia

A wiki is a very flexible Web page that allows additions, edits, and deletions by anyone who has the permission to use that particular wiki. The largest and most famous wiki is Wikipedia, which offers editing permission to everyone, with certain exceptions. Most of these exceptions occur when people cannot come to an agreement about what should appear about an extremely contentious topic. The Wikipedians (i.e., the official moderators of Wikipedia) may decide to freeze a highly controversial page (for example: the page about Abraham Lincoln). Thus, Wikipedia has been called "the sum total of all agreed-upon human knowledge."  

The Reliability of Wikipedia

Because Wikipedia is a wiki, its reliability as a source has been a controversy from its inception. Officially, most academic institutions at every level forbid using Wikipedia as a source for research or even for homework papers. On the other hand, Wikipedia is a good place to start thinking about more serious research. At the bottom of a Wikipedia page, there usually is a reference list, whose items are usually acceptable in academic papers. So a Wikipedia page can point you to usable sources. 

Here's a February 2019 "Crash Course" review of Wikipedia and its potential value to academics, students, and citizens of the digital world. Yes, it is a bit dated in the era of high-tech, but it retains its excellence. Please watch it carefully.

Wikipedia and ELLs

Despite the inherent problems of Wikipedia, there is potential value for ELLs that might convince a teacher to use it judiciously. 

"Simple English" Wikipedia

Wikipedia offers a "Simple English" version of many of its pages. Unfortunately, this usually does not mean the simplification of stylistic and grammatical structures; but nevertheless, the articles are very brief, in comparison to the original English article. Weaker students, who may be overwhelmed and intimidated by a long English article, may feel capable of tackling a brief article. In this way, the students will have a sense of what the class is doing and perhaps will access prior knowledge about the topic. 

One way to get to the Simple English Wikipedia page is to go to the regular English Wikipedia page for your subject and then click on the "<number> Languages" on the right side of the screen, across from the title of the page. Go to the "Worldwide" section of the drop-down, and hopefully you will find Simple English. 

Another way you can access Simple English is with the search bar on the Wikipedia homepage. Click on the down-pointing arrow, get a drop-down list, and choose Simple English. You then can type in your subject. 

L1 Wikipedia Pages

Now that you know where to find Wikipedia pages in the alternative-languages menu, you might consider letting very weak ELLs read about the current class topic in their own L1s. They will probably get some content value from the page and perhaps access prior knowledge about the topic.  

Please note that Wikipedia pages in alternative languages are not translations of the English article. Wikipedians and other contributors, who speak the other languages, write these articles as independent Wikipedia pages, which then link to the English article. This means that the content of the alternative-language page may, or may not, be the same as the English page. It also means that the alternative language page may reflect the ethnic, cultural, and national worldviews of those authors. All of these differences may make the alternative page even better than the English page, but it is an unknown situation. If you are lucky enough to have a colleague who reads that alternative language, you might want to ask for some help.

Wikipedia and Copyright

One of the many positive elements of Wikipedia is that it is all Creative Commons! Under the terms of "Attribution-Share-Alike License," you can use the text and the images legally, as long as you attribute the original Wikipedia page and mark your work as "Attribution-Share-Alike." Not only that, there are other websites, associated with Wikipedia that offer more Creative Commons material. You will see the links to these websites at the bottom of the Homepage of Wikipedia:

Machine Translation (including A. I. Chatbots) 

Research in machine translation has been developing for many decades. Today, there are many good translation programs, including ones based on AI. Some are specialized for certain professions, some are general. Like in most technologies, Google has one of the best services.

Nevertheless, be careful using any translation service. Poorly translated texts have caused minor international crises and many embarrassing moments for teachers, tourists, and other users. It's always a good practice to review the output of a translation tool before you actually use it. (Probably the ultimate test for a  translate is if the reverse translation comes out the same as the original. ) Unfortunately, sometimes this not possible. For example if you are translating information for a student's parents who speak a language that you don't speak, it could be problematic. If possible, get a colleague or friend who does speak the language to check the content.

Another unfortunate aspect of Google Translate (and other translation services) is the increased ability for students to cheat in foreign/second language class. For example:

• Students could translate a text from the original to their L1, thus by-passing the learning experience of reading and comprehending the language that was being taught.

• Students could find and translate texts for a project and integrate them into their own work.

• Students could write papers in their L1 and translate them into the language that was being taught and claim that the translations are their original work.   

All of these unfortunate situations, and more, happen quite often. Not only are the students cheating on the given homework, they may also cause the teacher to spend valuable time evaluating and correcting the translated document! In response, teachers have to develop an additional sense in order to sniff out such translation cheating. You usually know the linguistic level of your students; so when advanced vocabulary, grammatical structures, and style elements suddenly appear in their work; then it's time for a "reality check." Ask the student the meaning of advanced vocabulary items. Ask them the meaning of using the advanced grammatical or stylistic elements. Then you decide how to respond.

On the other hand, despite the obvious advantages of actually speaking a foreign language; think about the possibilities in the world for people who can be functional in another language with a few computer strokes. Does a worker in an international company really need to know Latvian, Vietnamese, or whatever to correspond via email?

Back in the classroom, teachers use Google Translate to communicate with immigrant kids who have no common language with the teacher. If there is an understanding that a translation may not be exactly what was expected, then the student can participate in the class better. Of course, this is no alternative to actually learning the language of the class, but it does offer immediate solutions to immediate problems.

And of course, there are copyright implications for translated texts. A translation is a "derivative" of the original copyrighted text. Therefore the original copyright protection extends to cover the translated version. 

Google Translate

Go to Google Translate and explore the tool.

Try typing (or COPYing and PASTing) bits of text in each of the languages that you know. See how they turn out in all the other languages that you know.

Use the "Document" button and translate a few different document formats (e.g., .docx, .pdf, .ppt). How would you evaluate the output?

Speech Recognition and T-T-S

Set the input language to one that you speak and the target language that you know fairly well. Do the following to examine the speech recognition abilities, and the T-T-S abilities: 

• Type a sentence into the box on the left. A translation should appear in the box on the right. 

• Click on the speaker icon in each box and evaluate the audio output in each language. 

• Then click on the microphone icon (at the bottom of the left-hand section) and say a few things. How well did it understand your voice and how good was the translation? 

Don't be surprised if these functions don't work well with heavy non-standard accents or in languages that do no use Latin fonts.

The Challenge to Teachers

• Think about how you could use Google Translate in a constructive way in your classroom. 

• Think about the ways that you can protect yourself from being bamboozled by clever students claiming translated text as their own work. 

• As Google Translate gets better and better, what does this mean for foreign/second language teachers?

Of course, the same types of challenges (and more) are posed by AI.

(Optional) Some Interesting Research about Google Translate and Foreign Language Learning

Here's a link to a February 2022 article in Language Learning & Technology,

There is no homework for this lesson.