The last student to give a speech contest speech today was the one I figured I’d have a lunch date with tomorrow. He’d already refused to do his speech once before as he only had two sentences finished and I wasn’t expecting great things today.

I didn’t get them, but I did get a speech. Of sorts.

The student gave a speech that was long enough and almost resembled English. The words were English, but not much else was.

What he had done–and in his defense he wasn’t the only one–was enter Japanese into an online translator app and then copy what the machine told him. This is almost always a bad idea as the translator interprets words literally and, even when it’s reasonably accurate, it often uses words the students don’t understand.

For example, here are two translations of the opening passage of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country.

Original version:
国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。夜の底が白くなった。信号所に汽車が止まった。
向側の座席から娘が立って来て、島村の前のガラス窓を落とした。雪の冷気が流れこんだ。 娘は窓いっぱいに乗り出して、遠くへ叫ぶように、「駅長さあん、駅長さあん。」
明かりをさげてゆっくり雪を踏んで来た男は、襟巻で鼻の上まで包み、耳に帽子の毛皮を垂れていた。

Human translated version (taken from this site):
The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop.

A girl who had been sitting on the other side of the car came over and opened the window in front of Shimamura. The snowy cold poured in. Leaning far out the window, the girl called to the station master as though he were a great distance away.
The station master walked slowly over the snow, a lantern in his hand. His face was buried to the nose in a muffler, and the flaps of his cap were turned down over his face.

Google Translate:
It was a snowy country when I passed through a long tunnel in the border. The bottom of the night turned white. The train stopped at the traffic light.

A daughter stood up from the seated side, dropped the glass window in front of Shimamura. The cold air of snow flowed. My daughter embarked on a window full and shouted to afar, “Station length, Ann, station length anan.”
The man who stepped on the snow slowly while slowing down the light wrapped up over the nose with a collar and was hanging a fur of a hat in his ear.

What I especially like is how the translation app turned this passage: 駅長さあん、駅長さあん (Station Master-san, Station Master-san) into  “Station length, Ann, station length anan.” 

Granted, the human translator summarizes the woman’s shouting rather than quoting it as it was in the original (big can of worms there), but at least it makes sense, is actual English, and has some style.

The biggest problem is many of my students are just pushing for the barest minimum passing grade, which isn’t that hard to get. Doing a good job on the speech contest speech runs the risk of getting you sent to the speech contest.

The other problem is they can’t use translator apps on the final exam. Things change a lot them.