Teaching translation in the age of an ever-more awesome Google Translate - thread (I know I’m Twitter-invisible so please do share to anyone who may want to engage) /1

So I’ve recently found out I’m teaching a remote English-Arabic translation class to 3rd year students this term. The last time I taught this module was in 2013, and even back then, students had started to sneakily take out their ipads during class, or put their homework in GT /2

but for me it was instantly recognisable as a machine translation. Today, we have a double-whammy: 1, GT is becoming more amazing every day. Any 3rd year Arabic student would be proud to reach that level. 2, teaching is remote, so in class, there’s no way of telling students /3

...students to stay off the technology. So my approach, I thought, will be to acknowledge that GT exists and work with it, not against it. Some of the activities I’ve already thought of are: Critiquing GT and focusing on text types that illustrate its weaknesses, looking at /4

... different approaches to translating idioms, metaphors, culture-specific terms, humour, producing gist translations, and focusing as much on pre-translation analysis and post-translation discussion of decisions as on the actual translation. /5

Now my dilemma is that I’m meant to focus on simple media texts, which frankly GT does brilliantly – so 3rd year students will have a hard time picking issues with it or improving on it. So that's it... I'm open to tips and suggestions! :) /6 [end of thread]

@sawadhussain @rashasoliman04 @e_arabic @Haroon_Shirwani share if you like, thank you! :D