The Role of Google Translate for Indonesian EFL Learners

As a lecture, teaching english for Indonesian student is very challenging. I started to wonder if there was an easy way to make them understand quickly. I started to do same research on how to teach English, complied many material for teaching English and apply them in class with my student.  Then i recognise that at present we are living in an era that praises technology, I decided to use Google Translate to teach English. For your information, google translate is an application provided by Google Inc that can translate from one language to another. This application really help people in understanding one language to another. therefore, I decided to conduct a test with my student, observe how they use google translate, make them to point out the advantages dan disadvantages of google translate and how it can enhance English proficiency development after using Google Translate. 

The findings shows: 

1. Advantages of using Google Translate in learning English

From the result of the questionnaire, the participants have different perception regarding the advantages of using Google Translate, they are as follows:

• It is free and quick. Participants thinks that by using Google Translate they can search the meaning of a certain word quicker, so it will save their time in doing their task rather then they have to open a traditional dictionary.
• Help them to translate words and provide them with the variation of translation for that specific word.
• Help the students to know the synonym of a word either in the source language or the target language.
• Students are able to know the word class of a specific word either for the source language or the target language.
• Students know how to pronoun words either in the source language or the target language correctly because google translate has an audio button, so when the student click that button, a recorded voice of native speaker will pronoun the word and also it can read out the whole sentences.
• Students found that Google Translate is good for phrasal learning because google translate provide them with option of phrases that contain a certain word that they are dealing with. 

2. Disadvantages of using Google Translate in learning English

From the questionnaire, the student also found that Google Translate do not help them and give disadvantages for them with the following reason:

• Students found that Google Translate tend to do the translation word per word, so when they write down a complex sentence, the result of the translation does not sound natural. This happen because Google Translate normally used the most common word used by people and sometimes that common word does not fit the meaning of the source language word and it leads to mistranslation or lost in translation.
• Student found that Google Translate contain significant grammatical error because Google Translate uses the method based on language pair frequency rather than the grammatical rules. 

3.  English proficiency development after using Google Translate

Based on the answer of the students, there is some English proficiency that they can improve after using Google Translate as follows:

• Students stated that after using Google Translate they improved the vocabulary list either in the native language or target language because google translate provide the its search engine with the meaning, synonym and the variation of translation for certain word.
• After using Google Translate, student found that their grammar ability has improved in terms of knowing the right word class of a certain word and also good for their phrasal learning because they can know and learn phrases that they have not been taught yet.
• Improvement in speaking skill especially pronunciation because after clicking the audio button in which a recorded native speaker voice will pronoun the word, the student will repeat the pronunciation of that particular word.