I really really hope that one of my independent research students wrote his Senior Spanish Essay in English and put it through Google Translator. This is the best case scenario for me. I need to be able to blame the horrible jumble of meaningless fragments I received from this student on Google Translator.
The worst case scenario is that the student’s Spanish is really that bad.
The Spanish speakers who read this blog will appreciate the depth of my desperation when they see the following snippet from the essay in question:
Como ha publicado a ser tal novela bien para los personajes que ya no es tan gran. Esto significa que cuando la ciudad de las obras de las sociedades Hispanoamérica que ha sido pelado a casi nada, como que producen en.
There are 6 pages of this + the bibliography.
This has to be Google Translator, right? No human being can come up with. . . this, right?
Clarissa's Blog 
I can’t even tell what that is trying to communicate. I thought my Spanish was decent, but now I realize the mark of true fluency is being able to make sense of garbled language. I can usually work out what my students are aiming at in English, my native language.
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I can’t make sense of this either. Which is why I think the author of this had to be a non-human. 🙂 I’ve been deciphering poor Spanish writing for years but never anything like this.
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It’s from Dante’s Inferno after Dante entered the event horizon.
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Yes, I have now discovered a fresh circle of hell.
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There’s another possibility: that the student copied the text from somewhere else and then tried to change the phrasing to make it difficult to find the source but didn’t pay attention to whether the result made sense or not. Last term I received a similarly garbled paper (in English) which I thought had been run through Google Translate but turned out to have been created in this way.
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Ah! This might well be the answer.
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Would this student be the Spanish equivalent of English As She Is Spoke?
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Oh yes, common problem at my institution too. But there students choose their advisors, so you don’t have 10 at the time. When I see those paragraphs, I just send the whole thing back and ask them to rewrite. At that point, I don’t care if their Hispanic roommate writes it for them. The problem is that, unless the student either had a good background in Spanish from HS, or spent a few months in a Spanish speaking country studying, 95% of the time their Spanish id going to be at best mediocre by the time they graduate.
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This is so sad. Have you taught this student before? I don’t understand how a student can reach senior year without at least learning that Google Translate is not the answer! How much time do they have left for revision work?
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No, I never had this student before. This is why I have no idea whether this is really his level of Spanish. I hope not but you just never know.
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Maybe you should try musical tools and see if they work
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Good luck having that conversation…
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