How do you go about getting the information you need, if you have only passing familiarity with the language that the information is in (or no knowledge of it at all)? Have you ever been able to overcome a language barrier, and if so, under what circumstances, please?
Looking forward to learning your strategies, any work-arounds, or tricks.
On a personal level, I have friends on Facebook and Twitter who post in languages other than English. Sometimes I copy and paste in Google Translate to at least get the gist.
Yes, I use Google Translate, or in Facebook Bing translate, to translate Chinese to English, both for Facebook friends in Asia and for my halting attempts to use the Chinese social network QQ.
For short statements, the meaning may be clear. For longer Chinese paragraphs, as Lori said, you may get the gist or you may not.
Asians often focus on key words in listening to native speakers. It is kind of the same translating Chinese text to English using machine translations. :-)
Victoria,
I faced a lot of problem with online information. In my experience I find a lot of difficulties in locating literature.
Firstly when I search through Keywords a lot of irrelevant documents (noise) come out. Actually this is a case of web semantics and the selecting keywords as a second language. Guessing of keywords may influenced by the conceptualizing pattern through mother- tong. Translation of ideas is not 100% accurate into another language. As a result we retrieve irrelevant documents.
Secondly I use the Google translation and Bing translation to translate documents into English which is not fully satisfied.
Thirdly I found transliteration is the worst. I checked with transliteration of personal and place names of Sinhala and Russian (with Roman letters) in online transliteration services. I found a lot of variations in reading original languages.
We can use searching techniques such as Boolean operators and advanced search. Yet it effects with keyword selecting.
Language barriers occur not only in searching but also in retrieving information from the source. In my lectures I asked Teacher Librarians to help children locate and find information for their projects. The question they raised was there were no enough literature in local languages (Sinhala) and no use of them. Public schools conducting courses in Sinhala /Tamil.
Jagath Garusing Arachchige, thanks so much for your reply. I can certainly hear your frustration with at least 3 issues. 1. Query formulation (i.e., what you call guessing keywords) is known to be a tricky task, even for native speakers (of any language). Typically it's an iterative process: you try a few words, as you say, then you refine your search and hopefully you get something useful by the end of this relevance feedback process. 2. Not being able to assess the search results is probably most frustrating and time-consuming, too many options often, takes too much time and effort, and does require language familiarity. 3. Not having enough and/or high quality resources in your native or working language is perhaps one of the most serious issue that does force you to turn to translations. What did the Teacher Librarians that you consulted recommend you and your students do to get around these (or other related) issues?
Brady, that's a thought-provoking article, thanks for the link!
Indeed, will interpreters/translators no longer be needed by 2027?
And, what would we all do if Google-Translate (or BabelFish, Bing and alike) suddenly decide to charge for their "rough" translation services regardless of the range of their quality translations from "impressive to unintelligible"?
Michael Marek, thanks for sharing your experiences.
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