Translation tools can be incredibly useful for language learners in the reading practice of their target language. Traditionally seen as simply a tool to translate text into another language, they can also be utilized to enhance the learning of the target language.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that translation tools are going to take over the world and that human translators won’t be necessary soon. By having a human complete the translation, you have a guarantee that what was translated was correct. A machine will tell you it has correctly translated the text, but you have no way of knowing if your message will be received correctly, without having another human in the chain.

You may have seen funny videos of texts being translated multiple times before going back to the original language to see how far off it is from the original. Although this is sometimes done humorously to show how wrong the new version is, it is a good illustration of the way that machine translation works and why humans are still hugely useful for translation.

How To Use A Translation Tool To Help With Language Learning

So you’ve got a text that you mostly understand and there are a few sections that you know you haven’t got quite right. Perhaps you’ve looked up individual words already but that didn’t help give you the full picture.

You turn to a translation tool and put in the sentences you didn’t understand. You find the answers, tell yourself that you wouldn’t have got that right anyway because you didn’t know the grammar that was used, and move on to the next segment of the text.

You’ve missed a vital part of learning that a translation tool can offer: giving you insight into sentence structures and new grammar.

Spend some time looking at the sentence to see if there is anything different about the sentence to help you next time you come across this structure. Are there common words that you know that are used in a different way here? Is there a similarity in the structure to English?

Using AI-Language Translation Tools For Language Learning

The above thoughts tie in quite well with the idea of using AI-generated translation tools. These are new and upcoming translation tools that work just as well as traditional translation tools such as Google Translate. Because they are language-based, they are generally good at this, compared to some of their math skills – at the moment.

There is a whole post on using conversational AI for language learning, but besides this, you can also simply just ask apps like ChatGPT to translate whole segments of text. With some of these apps, they will remember what they have translated to pick out inconsistencies with later texts, or to help keep the context in any questionable sections later on.

Using Translation Tools To Expand Vocabulary

You’ve just found a new word in your target language. You’ve added it to your vocab list and found an English meaning for the word. If you want to expand the number of ways to learn this new word, you might want to find natural sentences this word fits into. These sentences could then be used in cloze sentences in Anki (the vocab tool you should definitely be using) to help with your language learning.

Next, you might want to find alternative meanings for the word itself. The new word you’ve found in your target language may come with negative or positive connotations that will be discovered by finding multiple meanings for that word.

Many words have nuanced meanings to them or are used interchangeably when technically they shouldn’t be. For example, quiet and silent are both used to mean quiet, as well as silent. In reality, these two words mean different things.

Google Translate is a specifically effective tool, but others will also help you in this aspect of your language learning.

Common Mistakes Of Using Translation Tools

Although using a translation tool isn’t wrong in and of itself, there are a few pitfalls that you should be aware of when using such a tool for language learning.

Translation tools are being continually improved, however, this doesn’t mean that as humans we can become complacent and assume they know best.

When given the wrong information, tools can create very fast, very accurate mistakes. Furthermore, communication through language is nuanced and relates to context. It is difficult to translate into another language with the same sense of feeling and nuances and this is a factor that causes machine translation to struggle. The context of sentences can change how they are translated. If a single sentence or phrase is put into a translation machine, the result may be different from what you need in your context.

When reading texts that do not make sense, translation tools are useful for bypassing unknown grammar. For example, if you were a new German learner and had not yet learned anything about the Genitive case, a translation tool may be helpful to give you a boost in sentences using that case.

Relying Too Heavily On Translation Tools

It’s all well and good to use translation tools to help give you a bit of a boost, but be careful about relying too heavily on this method before you have a good grasp of the target language. If you don’t have a solid base of the language, both in vocabulary and some grammar, you will likely lean on the tool to give you answers rather than using the tool for learning.

It can be easy to rely on these too much when you are learning the language by yourself at home, or when you are writing an assignment. If you were using textbooks to learn the language, you might find that you are simply plugging in lots of information in the translation tool rather than actually practicing yourself. While using textbooks is not a bad thing, you do need to make sure that you’re still authentically learning, rather than simply relying on the translation tools you’re using.

Historically, translation tools had a weakness in translating complex sentences in a word-for-word fashion, which resulted in clunky, non-sensical translations, particularly when any sort of idiom was used. Translating idioms between any two languages is fraught with issues, particularly when there is no comparable idiom to use. You may find yourself with texts that seem meaningless if there are too many idioms being translated.

Using Translation Tools To Translate Into Your Target Language

Using translation tools to translate from your target language into your native language for language learning is a viable learning method.

Using a translation tool to write from your native language into your target language is most likely a mistake.

The reason this is the case is purely due to the difference in skill level between the two languages. You will want to write complex and dense sentences that you won’t be able to do in your target language. If you could do it in your target language, you wouldn’t need the translation tool.

The issue with this method is that translation tools will create unnatural sentences for you. They will sound translated and clumsy. Furthermore, you won’t be learning anything by simply writing sentences in English and popping them into Google Translate.

You are much better off writing the sentences yourself and perhaps making them simpler. This will still push you for vocabulary and grammar knowledge, which a translation tool simply wouldn’t do.

If you do insist on using a translation tool for your work, make sure that you are also proofreading the result to ensure that there are no grammatical mistakes and that the words that are used make sense to you.

What Is The Best Translation Tool For Translating Languages?

Now that you know what the best use of a translation tool is, what is the best translation tool for the job?

Is there a more accurate translator instead of Google Translate?

Although Google Translate does a fairly good job, there are new and upcoming machine translators that can also compete. One of these is DeepL Translator, which also does a very good job of translating texts. Some reviews show that DeepL, at least for German <–> English, perhaps uses a slightly better choice of words in translations in both directions.

Presuming you are not bulk-translating huge paragraphs or texts, almost any machine translator will be able to give you a reasonably good guide for what is being written in the other language.

Both of these tools are machine-based. Another solution that you may find beneficial is the website Linguee. This offers you the ability to write words or phrases and get results showing those same words or phrases used in real contexts. This can be hugely useful to see any underlying grammar that your word may require that you weren’t aware of or specific connotations or meanings of your words that you did not know.