Why Google Translate Can’t Teach You German Reading
I spent the whole last year looking for German newspaper articles with differing levels of difficulty, classifying their difficulty level and translating and summarizing them into English.
To speed up the process, I used Google Translate to do the raw translation and then edited, polished, or sometimes redid the translation from scratch myself.
It will not surprise the reader that cultural concepts, idioms, philosophical thoughts, bad German, slang, or complicated and sophisticated structures (like da-compounds) are not so easy for Google Translate to handle.
What surprised me, however, was that Google Translate often, albeit not always, has problems with the detection and thus correct translation of separable verbs.
The reasons why and with what mistakes separable verbs are translated vary. These mistakes are often comparable to the problems learners of German can have when translating such sentences.
Here are a few fresh examples I found just for this article:
“Anrühren”
Here is an example with the word “anrühren”, which the dictionary translates as “to touch” in the following senses:
1. to not touch, i.e., abstain from alcohol/food, etc.
2. to touch on a topic
3. To mix dough, paint, etc.
4. To be touched/moved to emotion (e.g. to tears).
As happens with German learners, Google Translate, too, does not consider all possible translations and so, in this case, the right one is not found:
Original sentence in German:
Die Hexe, die in dem Haus am Fuße des Berges wohnt, rührt jeden Abend bei Sonnenuntergang ihre heilsamen Zaubertränke an.
The English translation by Google Translate:
The witch, who lives in the house at the foot of the mountain, touches her healing potions every evening at sunset.
The English translation by DeepL is in this instance better than Google:
The witch, who lives in the house at the foot of the mountain, stirs her healing potions every evening at sunset.
“Aufkratzen”
In this example, Google just ignores the prefix “auf”, which, correctly translated, means “open.”)
Original sentence in German:
All dies kratzt alte Wunden auf und führt nicht zu Lösungen.
The English translation by Google Translate:
All of this scratches old wounds and does not lead to solutions.
The English translation by DeepL again is better:
All of this is scratching open old wounds and not leading to solutions.
“Nachsagen”
In this example, the prefix “nach” is translated by Google as a preposition instead of as part of the verb — a mistake German learners also often make.
The original sentence, in German:
Kritiker sagen ihm die schlimmsten Dinge, die man sich vorstellen kann, nach.
The English translation by Google Translate:
Critics say the worst things you can imagine after him.
Here “nach” is incorrectly translated as a preposition instead of as the prefix of the verb “nachsagen.”
Although DeepL’s translation is better, it doesn’t catch the nuance:
Critics say he does the worst things imaginable.
A more nuanced translation could be the following:
Critics badmouth him with the worst things imaginable .”
These mistakes that Google, but also German learners make, make sense, come to think of it, as one has to be able to see several elements in order to “decode” a separable verb.
It is technically a simple concept but has to be understood perfectly and the vocabulary has to be learned in order to “solve the riddle” and convey the meaning of the sentence correctly. This shows the brilliance of the human brain. If it systematically learns in a step-by-step approach, it can surpass the computer’s translations.
