Translation + exams

[mrbios]

We've got quite a large range of different EAL students who throughout the school year will use an iPad with Google Translate in order to translate their language to English, or vice versa.

 

Come exams, the school wanted to use these in the exams rather than old paper copies of dictionaries. However it's proved difficult to achieve the exam conditions with them, we tried downloading offline language packs, forcing the devices to go offline during school lesson times in order to block the dictionary stuff and the "more translations" bit etc, but some language packs include the nouns verbs etc details as part of the language pack, which apparently isn't allowed.

 

It feels like we're trying to hamfist a technical solution to replace paper when in actual fact paper dictionaries are just the best way to achieve exam conditions, however short of telling our EAL lead that, i wanted to see if anyone here has an alternative solution to translation and exams that's suitable for exam conditions we might look into?

 

We've got one student that likes to actually write with her finger rather than using the on-screen keyboard, in Ukrainian and then have that transcribed into english...but that seems to be an online only feature. Doubt we can solve that one, but thoughts?

[PotNoodleTech]

Yeh we only use the offline version of apple translate on totally offline ipads.  Downloaded the few language packs online before taking it offline.

 

It works for what our exams officer wants (text translation, and photo OCR translation only) but I can see it could become problematic if you want to use any of the more advanced stuff.

 

Havent found anything else useful most of the other tranlsators need to be fully online anyway.  I think google translate has an offline mode on ipads but not sure how much that cuts down the functionality.

 

Edited June 10, 2025 by PotNoodleTech

[Rob_D]

Microsoft Translate lets you download languages for offline use, but I don't know if it will have the same problem as the google one.

[mrbios]

23 minutes ago, Rob_D said:

Microsoft Translate lets you download languages for offline use, but I don't know if it will have the same problem as the google one.

Huh...... i actually had no idea that microsoft had their own translator. Just tinkering with that on my phone, looks like it maaaay be an option. Will test that avenue out and see how we get on.

[PotNoodleTech]

And apple!  Its built in - black icon with white and blue speech bubble.