Can I trust Google Translate? - Spanish

Can I trust Google Translate? My informal experiment (explained in last week's post) was to translate ten English travel phrases into Spanish, Portuguese and French in future posts and compare them to Google's translations.

This week's post is about Spanish, a language I feel fairly comfortable with, although I must admit it has been several years since I have spoken Spanish on a daily basis Here are my best guesses as to how I would translate the English travel phrases I listed last week.

First I had to decide if I was going to be travelling in Mexico or Spain because the vocabulary would be slightly different. I decided to imagine myself on a trip to Mexico (maybe to a resort in Cabo San Lucas in Baja California?) for this experiment.

My translations are the first ones in red, and Google Translate's are the second in blue. Differences in the two translations are underlined.

1. Where is the restroom, please?
¿Dónde están los servicios, por favor?
¿Dónde está el baño, por favor?
[Okay. I have trouble even in English deciding what to call that most necessary of rooms. In my house, it's a bathroom. When I am out in the world, it is a restroom. And in when I am in a fancy restaurant, I occasionally have the desire to call it the Ladies' Room. And then there's the toilet, the loo, the lavatory... ]


2. I have a (room) reservation for tonight.
Tengo reservación para esta noche.
Tengo una reserva (habitación) para esta noche.
[I probably should have used an indefinite article (una), the difference in the translation of 'reservation' is a regional difference, and Google didn't translate correctly when I put a word in parentheses.]


3.My name is Linda. What is your name?
Me llamo Linda. ¿Cómo se llama Ud.? (¿Cómo te llamas?)
Mi nombre es Linda. ¿Cuál es su nombre?
[Different ways to express the same thing. Both work for me. I included both formal and informal forms of address, which Google also provides in a drop down menu.]

4. When does the train leave/arrive?
¿Cuándo sale (llega) el tren?
¿Cuándo sale / llega el tren?
[Hallelujah! We agree!]

5. How much does it cost?
¿Cuánto cuesta?
¿Cuánto cuesta?
[No argument here.]

6.Pardon me.
Con permiso. Perdón.
Perdón.
[I agree with Google that perdón is the more general word. It can be used with both senses of asking permission and excusing oneself.]

7. Do you have a vegetarian dish?
¿Hay platos vegetarianos?
¿Tiene un plato vegetariano?
[No quibbling here. Both seem to work.]

8.May I have a glass of water please?
¿Me da un vaso de agua, por favor?
¿Puedo tener un vaso de agua por favor?
[Both work.]

9. I want to buy a ticket please.
Quiero comprar un boleto, por favor.
Quiero comprar un billete por favor.
[Regional vocabulary variation]

10.Where is the restaurant (bus station, train station, museum)?
¿Dónde queda el restaurante (estación de autobuses, estación de ferrocarril, museo)?
¿Dónde está el restaurante (estación de autobuses, estación de tren, museo)?
[One of the multiple meanings of 'quedar' is 'to be'. Both translations for 'train' work, but I like Google's better because I don't have to roll those r's!]


All in all, it looks like Google's translations into Spanish would communicate my travel needs. And isn't communication the goal here? Translations are often a source of intense controversy, so I would enjoy hearing comments, concerns, or complaints from readers. ¡Muchas gracias!

Can I trust Google Translate?

Last night, my husband Wayne and I watched a rerun of the movie "Midnight in Paris"  on TV.  It was even more enjoyable the second time around. 

Afterwards, I was bragging to Wayne that I had understood more of the French dialogue than before because I have been doing a free online course in French. "Okay," says Wayne, "so how do you say 'I want a glass of water' in French?"   Oops, he caught me.  I had forgotten that I need to learn practical words and phrases for our trip to Canada.

I decided then and there to write down ten of the most useful travel phrases for me personally and make sure I can say them in French, Portuguese and Spanish.  Those three languages, plus my native language, English, should take care of my travel needs for the next several years.  I knew I would need some help with the French.  Who should I turn to, but everyone's online friend Google Translate?

This was an embarrassing thought that gave me acute guilt feelings. I have spent years teaching foreign languages and threatening students with dire consequences if I caught them using Google Translate to do their homework. "Google Translate will get you in trouble.  It's not accurate," I warned haughtily.

So I am going to do the following experiment and share the results with you.  I will take the phrases listed below and attempt to put them in French, Portuguese, and Spanish.  If Google Translate does well with Portuguese and Spanish, languages that are more familiar to me, I will trust it to correct my amateur French translations. And I will put salt (or maybe a little New Mexico red chile powder) on my critical words concerning Google Translate and eat them if my findings exonerate that service.

My travel bookshelf

Here are my top ten useful travel phrases, in no particular order:

•  Where is the restroom, please?
•  I have a (room) reservation for tonight.
•  My name is Linda.  What is your name?
•  When does the train leave/arrive?
•  How much does it cost?
•  Pardon me.
•  Do you have a vegetarian dish?
•  May I have a glass of water please?
•  I want to buy a ticket please.
• Where is the restaurant (bus station, train station, museum)?

Are those the travel phrases that you would choose?  For next week's blog, I am going to translate them into Spanish and then check them against Google Translate.  Maybe you would like to do the same, and we can compare results.

How much French is enough French?

Celtic Colours Festival in Nova Scotia, Canada

With a trip to eastern Canada looming in several months, I feel it is my duty and obligation as a former language instructor (not to mention language lover) to work on my abilities in French.  You may have had the same dilemma with another foreign language that has a future in your life. 

The dilemma is the following: From a practical standpoint, just how much French should I try to learn or relearn in a few short months?  More specifically, which language skills should I concentrate on?  Shall I listen to lots of French conversations online to get some rudimentary listening knowledge?  It would be fun, after all, to eavesdrop on French conversations, on the street, in the hotel lobby or at the boulangerie (bakery) as I am trying to decide which lovely pastry to buy to go with my café au lait  (coffee with hot milk).  

Should I attempt to speak a few key phrases in French so that I can at very least greet, say goodbye, and thank a French-speaking Canadian?   Could I manage to utter Bonjour,  Au revoir , and Merci beaucoup? My neurosis about my strong American accent when speaking French is holding me up on this skill. I don't have a French speaker to practice with.  I'm too timid to enroll in one of the online language learning websites where you actually talk to French speakers with a program like Skype. ( I even get nervous using Skype in English, my native language.)  And what if, heaven forbid, I did manage to utter a French greeting with a reasonable accent, and the person addressed responded with a barrage of indistinguishable French sounds? I would probably turn tail and run.

Now the reading skill is another matter.  Such a wonderful skill for an introverted personality. I can already read French fairly well.  And given time and a bilingual dictionary, I can probably understand most non-technical material.  I imagine myself helping my husband make menu selections from an all-French menu (with a dictionary handy in my new smart phone).  And it would be a sneaky way to steer him to the healthier food choices.  

Now for the writing skill.  Will I be writing in French on our trip?  I doubt it.  And it's a shame, because writing is fairly accessible for practice.  The free online French course that I am slogging through right now (I'm on Lesson three of fifteen) has an exercise in which I listen to a sentence and write what I hear.  Then the program haughtily informs me if I have every word, accent mark, capital letter, and punctuation mark correct.  After a few tries, the program takes pity on me and gives me the correct written sentence.  It's like a little game, but how useful is it to me, I wonder? 

Then there is the matter of what words (vocabulary) to actually commit to memory.  For example, my French program wants me to learn many of the names of subjects taught at university; however, I don't think I will be chatting with many French-speaking university students.  The program also wants me to learn words like auberge de la jeunesse,  (youth hostel).   I may just do that to make sure we don't end up spending the night in one by mistake!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:La_maison_etre.jpg#filelinks

My last dilemma is how much to let myself be seduced by the finer points of French grammar.  As a person who believes that if your goal is to communicate in another language, using the language should take precedence over knowing grammar points, especially in the beginning stages.  But as a former Linguistics instructor with a love of Syntax, I can't help but be fascinated by two different French verbs used to form the passé composé,  each requiring a different form of the past participle.  Hmm.  I doubt if I will have many conversations in Canada about that!  

I think I have made my decision.  I'm going to concentrate on listening and reading (known as the receptive skills), practice a few key phrases to speak if I feel brave enough, and imagine where I may be using certain vocabulary words on the upcoming trip before I commit them to memory.  And I'll keep that thing about the past tense and past participles to myself.  I don't want people avoiding me in the club car on the train to Halifax!  

  

Isn't Everyone in El Paso Bilingual?

My husband Wayne and I both grew up in border towns.   Wayne is from Del Rio, Texas, and I am an El Pasoan. That shared cultural experience may have been one of the attractions we found in each other when we first met many years ago.

I have been interested in languages since I was a child.  My English-speaking cotton farmer father considered his command of Spanish something to show off and brag about.  We children were challenged around the dinner table to see who knew the Spanish word for a certain item.  My older brother and sister, more outgoing than I am, learned Spanish quickly from their playmates on the farm.  I developed an interest that made me an “A” student in Spanish class from sixth grade through high school and on through a Master’s degree in Spanish literature.

If anyone were to ask though, what language my husband and I speak at home, the answer would definitely be English.  But is it really?  Visitors to our home from other parts of the country often don’t understand us when we speak to each other because our English is peppered with Spanish expressions and pronunciations.

“Are you going to the grocería any time soon?” asks my husband hopefully as he searches in the pantry for a snack.  This, of course, is a play on words.  Many words in Spanish referring to a location where something is bought or produced end in ía, like papelería (store with paper supplies), panadería (bakery) , or taquería (a café with tacos as the specialty), just to name a few.  The joke is that the word grosería with the same pronunciation as our invented word grocería  means “a swear word.” Several years ago, a friend of ours made up a word based on the same principle when we were on a road trip through Mexico, saying that we needed to find him a peepeeyería as soon as possible in light of the large number of Mexican beers he had consumed!

Another of our favorite expressions comes from a situation that a friend of Wayne’s found himself in as he was trying to fast track a relationship with a lady he had just met in a bar.  As he described the course of events, he remarked that he had missed a good opportunity because the lady in question really seemed to be listo (ready).  Now, everyone knows that in Spanish, adjectives have to agree in gender with the nouns they describe, so a lady could never be listo. She would have to be lista, using the feminine form of the adjective. Wayne and I laughed about the story and started using listo as a shortcut for “I’m ready to leave the house now, are you?” with no attempt to match the adjective to the person.  Wayne even felt the urge to pluralize listo into listamos to ask if we were ready, on the theory that if verbs take the –amos ending for the “we” form (as in hablamos-we speak), why can’t adjectives do the same?

Trees and flowers are another area where knowing two languages gives the speaker a choice of words to use.  In our household, we tend to use the word that is shorter, more descriptive, or has pleasant associations.  The chinaberry tree in the back yard is seldom called by that name in our house.  It is the lila, which is easier to say and reminds us of the wonderful fragrance of its blossoms in early spring.  Ice plant is not as much fun to say as dedo, the Spanish word that also means”finger.”  The plant has fat fingers that spread out as a superb ground cover in our desert area.  The sweet acacia tree in the cactus garden is a huisache to us because Wayne’s mother always called it that, albeit with a Texas accent.  However, having several names for a plant is not always a good thing.  Several years ago, when I was on a native plant buying spree,  I paid more than I should have for a small plant with the exotic name of “Desert Spoon.” I discovered when I showed Wayne my purchase that it was just an ordinary sotol, of which we already had about twenty of various sizes on the property.  I planted it anyway.

Foods are yet another area where we use more Spanish than our friends from other parts of the world understand.  Naturally, there are all of the names for typical border dishes, such as enchiladas, tacos, chile con queso, guacamole, tortillas, tacos, salsa, quesadillas, and tostadas, which make up a large part of our diet.  But Wayne is as likely to ask me to serve him more tea “¿Más té, por favor?” or butter “¿mantequilla?” in Spanish as in English, perhaps to soften the blow of having to leave my rapidly cooling dinner to wait on him!

Is everyone in El Paso bilingual, then?  Probably, to some extent. But speakers exist on a continuum from monolingual Spanish speakers to monolingual English speakers.  I never know whether I should say the name of a street like Loma Verde with a Spanish or an English accent.  Sometimes I try to practice my Spanish in El Paso only to find that the person I am speaking to has the same idea about practicing their English.  We have a very odd conversation, each in a second language.

Wayne thinks of me as a walking dictionary for Spanish.  ”What’s the Spanish word for grommet?” he asks me innocently.  I don’t even know what a grommet is in English, much less in Spanish.  So bilingualism is more a process than a fait accompli in my life, but it certainly makes for some colorful conversations. I wish more El Pasoans would enjoy the two languages we have instead of wasting energy arguing about which one is best, or, heaven forbid, grammatically correct!

           

                  

¡Vamos a España!

"Do you have plans for fall of next year?" some good friends asked casually as we dined at a Chinese restaurant.  "Fall of 2014?  That's quite a ways away."  I answered.  "Well, how about joining us for a trip to Northern Spain?"  All I had to do was swallow my last bite of pork fried rice and glance at my husband for an okay before I responded "Great, let's do it."  And that's how our next travel (language) adventure began. 

I have always loved to travel, and I think I now know why.  It's not about adventure, because I am a conservative soul; it's not about fancy food and drink, because I don't drink and am always trying to diet; and it's not about meeting new people, because I am an introvert at heart.  But what travel does offer me is a great excuse to sit around and study other languages.  

Now I have the perfect reason to revive my Spanish.  It has lain dormant for quite a few years because I have been teaching undergraduate Portuguese language courses.  At one point in my life, the task was to take my Spanish and turn it into Portuguese.  I did that so successfully that now I still understand understand, read, and write Spanish fairly well, but when I try to speak, what emerges is Brazilian Portuguese.  Very embarrassing!  If the person I am speaking to is not familiar with Portuguese, they think I am speaking Spanish with a really strange accent.

/r/ 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Alveolar_trill.ogg

What has me most concerned is producing that trilled /r/ in Spanish. The sound is obligatory when a Spanish word is spelled with a double r.  When I was speaking Spanish on a regular basis, I could trill the /r/ at best 75% of the time.  Words like ferrocarril (railroad) I  tried to avoid altogether and instead substitute another word like tren.  I tried to never mention dogs (perros), although I am  a true animal lover, and I always used the more formal Spanish word coche for 'car' instead of carro, which is used in the Southwest.  I had to always be planning ahead to see what words with trilled /r/ sounds I could avoid.

One of the reasons I fell in love with the Portuguese language was because in most dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, that troublesome /r/ is not trilled.  It is made with a nice, easy sound, similar to a strong 'h' sound in English.  Ah, now that sound I can make.  When I visited Portugal, I heard the trilled /r/ again in European Portuguese, but I just ignored it and used my Brazilian dialect.  Problem solved!

All this kerfuffle over /r/ , you may be thinking at this point.  And you may be right.  After all, how important is perfect pronunciation if a person is communicating well anyway?  Some purists will insist that you must try to sound exactly like a native speaker of the language, but I believe that is an unreasonable goal for most language learners. 

Spanish subjunctive verbs don't scare me.  I can place double object pronouns in the right order and the right position.   Remembering which nouns are masculine and feminine holds no fear for me.  But oh that Spanish /r/!

I need some French - fast!

This is an emergency situation!  My husband and I are travelling  to Canada in the fall for the Celtic Colours Festival with stops in Montreal and Quebec.  Surely I need to be able to understand and speak a bit of French when I arrive.

The problem is that it's been a really long time (think Dark Ages) since I studied French in college.  At that time, I was fairly proficient at traditional French grammar, I read great works of French literature, and I could write in French passably well, if not idiomatically.  But could I speak French?  Like so many language students of bygone years, I learned a lot about French, but not to actually say anything useful.  I long to be able to at least request an order of poutine in French.  I think my husband is going to love poutine because I understand the main ingredient is fried potatoes.

So I signed up for a MOOC in Beginning French on http://www.openculture.com.  I am on Lesson 2 of 15, and I am congratulating myself for still being on task.  The short videos to practice understanding French are great because I can play them over and over.  It is fun to daydream about using some of the new phrases I'm learning with imaginary companions we may meet on the train from Montreal to Halifax.  Je m'appelle Linda.  Mon mari s'appelle Wayne.  Et vous?  But what if these companions ask a question that requires that I answer back?  My goose will be cooked!

I harbor some anxiety (okay, quite a lot of anxiety) about trying to speak French.  One of my college professors told me in class one day that I had the worst pronunciation of the French 'r' that he had ever heard in his teaching career.  And he was elderly and had been teaching for a very long time, so my 'r' must have been particularly grating to him.  Now every time I need to make that 'r' sound back in my throat, I become that shy twenty year old college student.  What lasting damage language instructors do to others by giving criticism, deserved or otherwise.

But am I going to let a small problem with a  French 'r' ruin my trip to Canada?  Can I just avoid all words with the 'r'' sound?  Probably not.   Courage! (I tell myself).

Where do I start with Welsh?

 "Where are we staying in Wales this summer?" asked my husband, wanting to make absolutely sure we chose the best possible accommodations with the best view, the best breakfast, at the best price.

"I researched a couple of towns on the North Coast, but I can't remember the names.  I can't even pronounce them!"  I complained.

That was the start of my desire to study the Welsh language.  I'm a language teacher.  I speak three languages and have studied a few more.  Surely, I told myself,  I could learn at least enough Welsh in the next year to be able to tell someone where we will be staying.  So I started devising a Welsh self-study  plan.  My goal was to teach myself, following the same philosophy I use in teaching Portuguese and Spanish in the college classroom.

Step One in acquiring a language is understanding the language.  Where could I hear and comprehend spoken Welsh?  I googled 'Welsh Language Study' and found quite a few sources.  It would have been great to enroll in an online course, but the perennial considerations, time and money, kept me from going that route. Did I really want to jump into Welsh grammar?  I almost fell into that trap.  Maybe I could order a nice grammar workbook where I could fill in the blanks with the correct form.   I teach linguistics courses and actually enjoy grammar.   But I knew that a heavy dose of grammar, though it might be intriguing to me personally, would not really be helpful until I had acquired enough Welsh language to apply it to.

What did appeal to me were websites that appeared to be more elementary.  Quick and dirty was what I wanted at this stage.  So I finally chose a site that described the Welsh alphabet.   Welsh has 28 letters, some of them double letters (dd, ff,ll), and some two letters combined (ch, ph, rh, th, ng), Also, the Welsh alphabet does not contain the following letters:  j, k, q, v, x, z.  Okay, interesting enough, but I still didn't know how to pronounce a word.  No wonder I don't teach the alphabet in foreign language courses, even though some students have complained that they would like to learn it.

Back I went to Google.  This time I found a site for Welsh pronunciation.  Oh, my, so many IPA symbols.  Some I knew from English phonetics, but did I really want to wade through the transcription of 14 diphthongs?  Certainly not.  When I read that three of the diphthongs have the same IPA pronunciation [eye], I decided just to fake the vowel combinations.  Vowels don't have that much sound compared to consonants, anyway.  This approach wasn't getting me very far.

Then I remembered an old Rosetta Stone CD forgotten in my desk drawer for many years. It was so old that it wouldn't work on my new laptop.  I found a former laptop stored up on an office shelf, dusted it off and booted it up.  It read the CD!   Yes, Welsh was on the list!  I was off on my language learning adventure!

Six months later, that same computer with the CD still inserted still sat by my reading chair.  I had not touched it since the day I set it up.  What had gotten in the way of my Welsh self-study plan?  Life.  And also wanting to do things too perfectly.  Obsessive-compulsive personalities do not make the best language acquirers.

The summer trip was looming in six months, and I still didn't know how to pronounce 'Llandudno' , the name of the Welsh coastal resort where we would be spending a few days before attending the London Summer Olympic Games.  I did some quick Internet research and found out that the double ll in Llandudno has a  sound that is difficult for English speakers.  The suggestion was to say the word 'whistle' with a lisp.  The sound in the second syllable of 'whistle' would approximate the ll sound.  So now my husband and I try to say 'Llandudno' correctly, looking pretty strange as we get our teeth and tongue in unusual positions to pronounce the beginning sound of the word.

At least I had made a start with the Welsh language.  Several weeks ago, I plugged earphones into the old laptop and listened to Level 1, Unit 1, Lesson 1 of Rosetta Stone.  I had used  Rosetta Stone  in the past to practice Portuguese and Spanish, but I had never used it to start a completely new language.  What were those people saying in Welsh, and why were they talking so fast?  What if I couldn't match the picture with the meaning of the word?  And it wasn't just words.  There were phrases as well.  What word in the phrase meant what?  I played the same lesson over quite a few times in different modalities, sometimes just listening to Welsh, other times listening and reading, sometimes just reading (the easiest!), and even doing some elementary writing.  I loved it when I got the smiley face and a pleasant chime sound for a correct answer, but I sometimes cursed under my breath when I received the X and an unpleasant sound for an incorrect answer.

Lesson 1 was now getting a bit boring.  I didn't know absolutely everything in it, but it was time to make myself move on to Lesson 2.  Now I'm up to Lesson 3.  The units follow a predictable sequence.  First I have to learn new material.  About 20 minutes of that is all that my brain can absorb.  For the next session, I review quickly and then practice with different types of exercises.  Each practice gets a bit easier, although sometimes my brain turns off completely or my attention wanders, and I miss the cue.  Maybe eventually I can learn a few choice words in Welsh to express my displeasure when I get the thumbs down signal.

I know that part of successful language acquisition is developing a 'tolerance for ambiguity'.   This was certainly true for Welsh.  For example, I was delighted to learn the word for 'cat' in Welsh, 'cath'.  Now I have a new name to call our pet Bitsy.  But wait, just when I had learned 'cath', I heard the speaker on the CD talk about the 'gath'.   I began to notice that other words were changing the beginning sound as well.  The phonological rule causing the sound change is still a mystery to me. Maybe I should reconsider ordering that Welsh grammar workbook.

The topic of Lesson 3 was the numbers 0-10.  Really now.  How hard is it to learn eleven numbers ?  I found out very soon just how hard it is.  Numbers are one of those concepts that a person learns once in their native language, I believe, and the numbers in subsequent acquired languages just never have the same deep meaning.  I still can't count from 0-10 in Welsh, but I can recognize the numbers when I hear them, which I suppose is the real use of numbers.  I don't get many requests to count aloud in any language.

After three lessons of Rosetta Stone study, I can now imagine myself on the boardwalk in Llandudno, holding fascinating conversations with Welsh speakers.  I can observe that the girls are walking, the horse is jumping, the airplane is flying, the boy is falling down, or, if we should see a fish, that the fish is swimming.  I can also indicate that I want not one but two scones at the takeaway coffee shop by the beach.  Who knows what friendships may be formed in Wales because I wanted to know how to pronounce 'Llandudno'?