Questões de Concurso

       Language teachers, like other teachers, had to quickly rethink priorities and means of delivery in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as measures to manage the pandemic. It isn’t surprising then that some of the findings in our 2021 survey relate to the pandemic.

       Language teaching was suspended by local education boards at one in five primary schools in January 2021 due to Covid-19, and the impact has been felt more acutely in deprived areas. Teachers in state secondary schools report that two in five pupils in Key Stage 3 (lower secondary) did not engage with language learning during the first national lockdown, leading to time lost to language learning for a lot of pupils.

         Dr Ian Collen said that “the most disadvantaged pupils are most likely to have been negatively affected by the impact of Covid-19, experiencing greater disruption to their language learning and fewer international opportunities. Looking to the future, schools should consider giving more curriculum time to languages, as well as more opportunities to use languages in real life, such as visits abroad.”

       Many teachers reported that they cannot wait to get back to face-to-face teaching in the classroom. Despite the barriers they have faced over the past year, it is encouraging to see how they pivoted to remote learning during the national lockdowns.

Internet: <www.britishcouncil.org> (adapted).

     Global tech giant Google has added 24 new languages spoken by more than 300 million people to its Google Translate platform. “For years, Google Translate has helped break down language barriers and connect communities all over the world,” the US-based company said. It added that it now wants to help those whose languages aren’t represented in most technology. The new languages range from Bhojpuri, which is spoken in northern India, Nepal and Fiji, to Dhivehi, with its estimated 300,000 speakers in the Maldives.

     The move now brings to 133 the total number of languages available on Google Translate as of May 2022. The company says the new languages also represent a technical milestone, explaining that they use a machine learning model which learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example. This can be useful for languages where large datasets of human translations, which can be used to train a computer, are not available. But the company admits that the technology isn’t perfect.

      So, will the translations be accurate? Some polyglots have noted problems with the languages already available. “For many supported languages, the translation is not great. It will definitely get the idea across but often it will lose much of the subtlety of the language,” Google Translate research scientist Isaac Caswell told the BBC.

      With the new languages, he said, it would be no different. But the people who helped in the research said it was a good place to start. “My impression from other people I have talked to was that it was a very positive thing for them,” Mr Caswell said. In 2020, Google Translate added five new languages to the platform in what was then its first expansion in the past few years.

Internet: <https://www.bbc.com/>(adapted).