Me: Peter, what possessed you to use Google Translate to translate your final essay?
Peter: Oh. I didn’t know we couldn’t use it.
Me: I gave an hour-long presentation in class on why it shouldn’t be used. We did an activity on the subject.
Peter: Oh. I didn’t understand what you were saying.
Me: First of all, if you don’t understand Spanish, we have a big problem already. And how come you failed to understand the following part of my presentation:
GOOGLE TRANSLATE?
Peter: Oh. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.
Please, semester, just be over now.
Clarissa's Blog 
Or if you use it, you should re-read the text and re-write it in good Spanish.
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This is a lot more difficult to do for somebody whose language skills are not very good. I always suggest to my students that they avoid any English at least for a half an hour before sitting down to write.
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You’re right.
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I always tell them that GT can be very very useful for experienced translators. But you first need to become an experienced translator.
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“I always tell them that GT can be very very useful for experienced translators. But you first need to become an experienced translator.”
Yeah I had to do an atypical translation recently bout a page long from one non-native language to another (unpaid and 100% accuracy or elegance was not vital).
I ran it through GT and got the usual half-coherent text which I used a starting point. I then sat down and double/triple checked and re-wrote it word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. The final version was pretty distant from that first GT version but all things considered using GT still saved me time and effort. But I have experience translating so I knew where likely problems would arise and what kinds of problems they would be and how to resolve them (and how to spot unexpected problems).
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