Google Translate and Transliterate

One of the many challenges we face as Educators is that there are so many languages spoken in the classroom and even if the student speaks English at school that is not always an good indiction that their parents also speak English.  There are many tools out there that help teachers and administrators to communicate with students and parents.  I have found that most of these tools are free from Google.  While none of these tools are perfect, the translation "mistakes" will be out weighed by the effort you took to communicate with the parent.

Google Translate: 
Google Translate will instantly translate text from one language to another.  It currently supports 67 languages.  Need help with pronouncing a word,  many any of the languages have spoken word translation.   Go check it out... Google Translate.

Google Transliterate:
Here is Google's description of Transliterate, "Google Translator Toolkit offers an automatic transliteration option for converting Roman characters to Arabic or the Indic characters used in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Tamil, and Telugu. This lets you type these languages phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation -- the sound of the words is converted from one alphabet to the other, not the meaning." Go check it out here...  Google Transliterate.

There is an App for That:
Are you struggling to communicate with a student and dont have time to go to your computer and type something out?  Take out your Android or iOS device and download the Google Translate App.  What I like about the app is that you dont even have to type.  Just speak into your phone and Google will translate it in to text and audio.

Download App here

• iOS App
• Android App