Machine Translation in the German Classroom: Detection, Reaction, Prevention

There are many websites today that offer free machine translations and although beginning students of German are not always proficient enough to judge the quality of these translations or to fully understand certain translation results, they use these services nonetheless for their assignments. The problem for the educator is to distinguish between machine translation and genuine student work. Depending on the assignment and the language level, this task can be very easy or quite difficult. This article describes approaches for dealing with texts that appear to be machine translated rather than “hand‐crafted.”