Translators
Some of these tools have been produced by the internet giants (eg. Google translate), but independent specialized tools like DeepL are also available.
Automatic translation has been a specific historical challenge for artificial intelligence and the diverse AI technologies have been tested over the years. Rule based systems (with rules hand built by experts) were replaced by statistical machine learning techniques when data-sets of parallel texts became available. And over the past 5 years deep learning techniques have become the state of the art.
Whereas a few years ago, you could have an enjoyable moment testing these tools which would return amusing translations for songs or menus for example, this is no longer the case today:
- International institutions are contemplating using automatic translation tools to support multilingualism.
- Big media video platforms will use automatic translation rather than human translation in order to reach out better.
- Bilingual people and translation professionals seem to use these tools in their life and in their professional activities.
Furthermore more improvements are still to come: the quality of translation is still increasing, solutions which combine translations with transcriptions and speech synthesis allowing seamless multilingual communication are going to be common in not so long.
Even if these tools have not been designed for education, they are already having an impact on education.
Are pupils using automatic translation?
To our knowledge there are today (December 2022) no public official documents measuring if this is an issue, nor large scale surveys.There are discussions on forums3 and articles presenting possible ways to avoid cheating with AI, or suggesting ways to introduce AI into foreign language classes. These make the assumption that the usage of automatic translation tools by pupils is wide-spread.
In a smaller and informal survey we ran in April 2022 with teachers of various languages (English, French, German) of different levels (the main classes corresponded to 12-16 year-old pupils), and in the Paris area-so the pupils and teachers were French-, the phenomenon was common. The teachers all had to cope with pupils who would, once out of the classroom, make use of DeepL or Google translate.
Here are some of the remarks we got:
• The only skill the pupils seem to be acquiring is copy-pasting.
• Even the better and more motivated pupils do it: they will try to do their homework on their own, but then they will “check it” with an Automatic Translation tool and most often realize that the automatic result is much better than theirs, so will keep the machine built solution.
• There is now even a motivation issue as pupils are starting to question the use of learning languages.
The above analysis needs much more work: a generalized survey over various countries would certainly help. But discussions with various stakeholders have allowed us to consider the following.
• When presenting the above experiments, a typical example is to discredit the idea that the teacher should just be asking, as homework, to translate a text. There is more to it: even for more creative exercises (like writing an essay on a particular question) automatic translation tools can be used: the pupil will write the essay in their own language, then translate it.
• The motivation question is critical. It is not new: in 2000 authors and educators would already argue: “some view the pursuit of foreign language competence as an admirable expenditure of effort, others may see it as unnecessary if an effective alternative exists”5.
Our observations coincide with reactions found in forums or reported in the literature4.
Can automatic translators fool teachers?
This question has been posed and today, blog papers seem to indicate that a language teacher will recognize automatic translation, even when it has been corrected by a human at a later stage: Birdsell1 imagined a task where Japanese students were to write a 500 word essay in English. Some had to write it directly, with the use of usual tools (dictionaries, spellers) and other would write the essay in Japanese and then translate it -using DeepL- into English. Interestingly, he found that the teachers would grade higher the students from the second group but would also be able to identify those essays written by DeepL.Can machine translation tools be combined with text generators?
These are early days to predict which will be the course of events, but the answer is for the moment, yes. As a simple example, journalists in France used a text generator tool (Open-AI playground) to produce some text, then ran DeepL on it and felt comfortable in presenting this text to the community2.Is using an automatic translator cheating?
This is going to be a difficult question to answer. When consulting discussion forums on internet3 you can easily be convinced that it is cheating: strict rules are given to students not to use these tools,and, if they don’t comply with the rules, they are caught cheating and will be punished. But arguments can also be presented in the other way: education being about teaching people to smartly use the tolls in order to perform tasks, how about making is possible for a pupil to learn to use the tools they will find available outside school?This textbook is not authorized to give a definitive answer here but we do suggest teachers to explore in which way these tools can be used to learn languages.
What should a teacher do about this?
Florencia Henshaw discusses a number of options4, none of which seem convincing:- The approach consisting in explaining that the AI just doesn’t work (a favourite in forums3): even when the pupils agree with this -but it is going to be increasingly difficult to convince them that a tool which works better than their parents is bad- they will still use it.
- The zero tolerance approach relies on being able to detect the use of AI. This may be the case today1 but it is uncertain if it will remain the case. It also needs to be questioned with relation to a fundamental question: is using AI cheating? In what is it different from using glasses to read better or a wheelbarrow to transport objects?
- The approach in which the tool can be used only in part (to search for individual words for example) is also criticized4: automatic translation tools work because they make use of the context. On individual (out of context) words they will not perform better than dictionaries.
- The approach of using the tool in an intelligent way, in and out of the classroom, is tempting but will need more work to develop activities which will be of real help to the learning situations.
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1 Birdsell, B. J., Student Writings with DeepL: Teacher Evaluations and Implications for Teaching.JALT2021 REFLECTIONS & NEW PERSPECTIVES 2021
2 Calixte, L, Novembre 2022, https://etudiant.lefigaro.fr/article/quand-l-intelligence-artificielle-facilite-la-fraude-universitaire_463c8b8c-5459-11ed-9fee-7d1d86f23c33/
3 Reddit discussion on Automatic translation and cheating. https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/p1cjiu/foreign_language_teachers_how_do_you_deal_with/
4 Online Translators in Language Classes: Pedagogical and Practical Considerations, Florencia Henshaw, The FLT MAG, 2020, https://fltmag.com/online-translators-pedagogical-practical-considerations/
5 Cribb, V. M. (2000). Machine translation: The alternative for the 21st century?. TESOL Quarterly, 34(3), 560-569. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587744
