Tilshunoslikdagi zamonaviy yo
‘
nalishlar: muammo va yechimlar
346
tend to use it more often both inside and outside the classroom. The reader may have
used Google Translate and may wonder how it actually works. For the sake of a
linguistic experiment, the abstract to this paper was almost fully translated from the
author’s mother tongue (i. e. Uzbek) into English and now appears only with some
minor stylistic adjustment. So how did and does this translation software actually do
it? In a rather playful mode, the official YouTube Google video shows an image of
bilingual elves working for them, but what actually does the job is the statistical
machine translation. The translation itself is based on various patterns which are
found in a large number of texts. The Google Translate creators are aware of all the
challenges involved in proper translations, especially in cases of exceptions, and the
exceptions to those exceptions. Thus, Google has decided to analyze a vast number
of documents already translated by humans. These documents come from a variety
of sources that include different books, etc. One of the underlying principles is that
Google computers are set to scan for statistically significant patterns. Thus, once
such chunks have been discovered, such methodology can be applied to similar texts
in the future. Google Translate developers admit that some languages have fewer
available chunks and that is why their software did not discover many of them. Also,
the translation will often depend on a particular language or a language pair.
Moreover, Google Translate has some undeniable advantages: it is free, instant; it
offers a variety of languages for input and output; it allows voice recognition,
translation of entire web pages, and an upload of entire files for instant translation.
Foreign language teachers may wonder what the abovementioned results
might imply for their own teaching. If vocabulary development seems to be the same
regardless of pupils’ using GT or printed dictionaries, shall pupils be left to choose
for themselves? Prohibiting pupils from using GT is probably fruitless, and more is
gained by showing pupils different ways of using it and discussing together why
different translations are more or less trustworthy or more or less faulty. This way of
dealing with GT in the foreign language classroom setting does not take for granted
that its use will enhance pupils’ language learning, but views GT, rather, as one of
several tools that are available to learners, and that they will benefit from knowing
in a less superficial way.
GT can be a useful tool to make language learners write, especially less
proficient learners who otherwise would not write as much or, perhaps, not at all; it
is important, though, that language teachers stress that it is improbable that GT in
itself will improve pupils’ vocabulary learning.