Here is a handy tool for LOTE teachers and anyone else wanting to communicate in languages other than English. Google Translate can do three great things:
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Enter a phrase in your selected language for search in another language
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Add a widget to your webpage to allow it to be translated instantly by readers in other languages
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Create content in other languages
Languages supported are:
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Albanian
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Arabic
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Bulgarian
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Catalan
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Chinese
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Croatian
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Czech
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Danish
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Dutch
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English
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Estonian
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Filipino
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Finnish
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French
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Galician
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German
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Greek
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Hebrew
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Hindi
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Hungarian
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Indonesian
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Italian
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Japanese
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Korean
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Latvian
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Lithuanian
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Maltese
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Norwegian
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Persian
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Polish
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Portuguese
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Romanian
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Russian
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Serbian
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Slovak
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Slovenian
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Spanish
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Swedish
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Thai
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Turkish
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Ukrainian
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Vietnamese
Google Translate seems like it could be very useful, however you may need a Google account to use it.
No account needed to use the widget. See my post:
In 2008, my year 9/10 ICT elective class particpated in a “cross culture blogging” activity. Post prompts were to be responded on a fortnightly basis. The schools were from three countries – Australia, USA and Korea. The Korean students blogs were all in Korean, so it was a real challenge for my year 9 and 10 students to try and interpret these posts as they had to respond back via comments.
However, using google translator and a lot of trial and error we were able to, in the main translate and keep conversations going between the two countries. We felt a sense of pride and achievement in being able to do so.