So I’d love to be able to speak Spanish with my grandma and my extended family.” “Especially because my family is from Puerto Rico. “That’s my goal,” Stawarz told me during our conversation. Stawarz studies Spanish in the RC, and like many other RC students, is working towards being bilingual. To get the student perspective on translation tools, I spoke over the phone with Sara Stawarz, a freshman in the LSA Residential College. They provide an excellent service for increasing understanding between people of different cultures, but for students, their usage comes with some intangible costs. Further, the relatively autonomous “end-to-end learning system learns over time to create better, more natural translation,” Turnovsky wrote at the time.įor many languages, translation tools have made huge advances from when I started learning French. In 2016, Google revolutionized its translation platform with the announcement of the Google Neural Machine Translation system.īarak Turnovsky, director of product at Google AI, claimed in 2016 that the particular advantage of Neural Machine Translation is the analysis of entire sentences rather than just phrases or words in its machine learning algorithms. Google Translate, for example, started out using statistical machine translation that systematically compared documents in different languages from online databases. Part of this appreciation has stemmed from improvements in software. Now, as a French and francophone studies major, I have gained an appreciation of the power of translation tools, as well as their limitations. Without a translator, I struggled through a lot of conjugations and awkward conversations before I started forming sentences on my own. Back then, Google Translate was only two years old and still pretty useless. It was also around this time that I started taking Sunday French classes at the Alliance Française in DuPont Circle. Left to my own devices - which, in this case, consisted of a pencil - I felt helpless. I bombed my first division and fractions test in third grade it had not occurred to me that the assessments would be a non-calculator affair.

Google translate español to english