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The translation exercises are terrible and should never be used by anyone not specifically training to be a translator. I’m an intermediate learner and I almost
by solarmist 6y ago
The translation exercises are terrible and should never be used by anyone not specifically training to be a translator. I’m an intermediate learner and I almost always can identify exactly what the phrase should mean, but when I try to write the English sentence more than 80% of the time I will phrase it differently than they do and get it wrong.
Translations make me spend time worrying about how EXACTLY the original translator phrased it rather than focusing on the contents of the sentences.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoNote that grading of translations is impossible for them to do without a model that maps arbitrary English to a semantic representation. I believe IBM actually implemented something like this as part of their "Watson" efforts, but there's certainly not a public solution around. That doesn't mean it's impossible to offer useful translation exercises, though. It means it's impossible to use a computer to grade them. If you, as the student, are willing to ignore whether you get marked "right" or "wrong", you get the full value of the instruction -- you make the attempt, Duolingo tells you what the sentence meant, and even though Duolingo can't tell whether your sentence meant the same thing, you can.