The last sentence was also changed significantly to sound more polite. Linlin opted to add 可以 to add a more moderate tone to the transformation statement (“I can help” rather than just “I help”), as well as 科学地 (“scientifically”) to describe the research-backed synthetic phonics teaching method. In this translation, 教师 was used for “teacher” instead of 老师, as 教师 is more formal and used in written language. Linlin kindly translated for us how she would write this for a social media bio: A professional translator would also take into account your brand voice and personality too. However, it did still use the broader translation for “phonics”, so wasn’t perfect.Īlthough machine translation tools are very advanced nowadays and do a good job for everyday messaging, sometimes nothing replaces a real person! This is particularly the case for languages like Chinese which have different formality to English, as well as differences in word usage or structures between written and spoken language. It also chose “教师” for teacher, rather than “老师” which the other websites all suggested – the latter being used more in spoken language and as an honorific, whereas 教师 is used more in formal, written language.Īdditionally, the last sentence was translated in a much more natural sounding way, using words like 获取 to emphasise what they will gain from following you. It was the only website or app to remember to add a quantifier in the second sentence – this is grammatically optional in Chinese, but important in this context to state that you are “an” English teacher rather than “the” English teacher from the UK. Indeed, DeepL certainly sounded the most natural in our test. Our final translation website is DeepL, which advertises itself as “the world’s most accurate and nuanced machine translation”. Linlin felt that some sentences felt a little unnatural too. Baidu also mistranslated “phonics” and opted to use the less formal word for “you” (你 as opposed to 您), which may be less suitable for communications with potential clients. However, similarly to WeChat, it mistranslated the phrase “become confident readers who do better in school”. In our test, Baidu translate produced a translation which conveyed the main message ok. In Chinese, the more commonly used terms are 自然拼写 (literally “natural spelling”) or 自然拼读 (“natural reading”).īaidu is the Chinese Google equivalent, with a wide range of services including Baidu Translate. In this test, Linlin felt that Google did a little better than WeChat in terms of meaning, but the phrasing was more unnatural and some words used inaccurate translations.įor example, Google translated “phonics” as “语音” which is a broader term also meaning “sound” or “voice”. Google translate is most people’s go-to choice for translation, and usually does a good job for most languages. Linlin, a native Chinese speaker and expert translator, then rated each translation out of 10 and analysed the mistakes made. Don’t forget to hit subscribe for weekly story time videos! Text used to test the translation tools Do you want your child to improve their English reading and vocabulary? I help children learn phonics and reading strategies, so they fall in love with reading English books and become confident readers who do better in school. Hi everyone! It’s Katie here, I’m an English teacher from the UK. The text used for each test was the same – a common set of phrases used in a self-introduction video or social media bio, including several phrases often mistranslated by teachers: We set out to test four popular translation apps / websites to see which performed best: WeChat translate, Google translate, Baidu translate and DeepL. Therefore, you need to use an external translation app or website to write your posts in Chinese. Additionally, important social media apps like XiaoHongShu (Little Red Book), which many online ESL teachers use to find students, do not have any translation features. WeChat, have built-in translation tools, these are not always very accurate and may lead to misunderstandings. One of the biggest challenges for online ESL teachers when promoting your classes or communicating with parents is the language barrier.Īlthough some apps, e.g.
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