Using an Online Translator to Learn French

May 11th, 2011... From The Desk of Corinne Corbeau:

You've seen them – those handy online gadgets that allow you to type in a word in English and receive its equivalent in French. They're online translators, and sometimes they allow you to put in a whole body of text, or even an URL, in the hopes of receiving an accurate translation of the whole thing. If online translators really worked the way we expect them to, the entire language education industry would be doomed to extinction. But so far, they're not all they're cracked up to be, and using an online translator may not give you the results you want.

Why not? Why can't you type in a perfectly good English sentence and expect an accurate translation? Well, for one thing, English is not French with different words. Each language has its own unique character, its own diction and syntax, and there is no "equivalent" French version of an English text. Something – besides the mere words – changes when you switch from one language to another, and when you are using an online translator, you're missing the fine points of that change.

As an example, using an online translator, let's type in the first line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Certainly the online translator ought to be able to translate that, right?

And yet it can't. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" becomes "Je comparerai le thee à un summer jour de s?" This doesn't even make sense – translated back into English, that means "I will compare the thee with a summer day of S." For some reason, the online translator moved the s on summer's to the end of the sentence, and didn't translate either thee or summer at all. Worse, it changed "Shall I" to "I will," making a question a statement. Using an online translator did Shakespeare no favors.

Are online translators any more reliable translating a contemporary letter? A bit – but not reliable enough. For one thing, in the sample I tested, it translated online as in line. It had no idea what to do with any word containing an apostrophe. It left any word it couldn't identify completely untranslated. And idioms were totally lost on it – "I wolfed down my dinner" became "Je wolfed en bas de mon diner" – I wolfed in the bottom of my dinner. I don't know what that means, but it can't be good.

Online translators generally do an adequate job of translating individual words from one language to another. But if you're thinking of using an online translator to help you write an entire letter or translating a website, think again. You'd get much better results from learning French.

If you want more proven tips and tricks learning French fast, then check out my guide,
How to Learn French...

Regards,

Corinne Corbeau

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