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Translation of essay – English-Spanish dictionary

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• I want to finish off this essay before I go to bed .
• His essay was full of spelling errors .
• Have you given that essay in yet ?
• Have you handed in your history essay yet ?
• I'd like to discuss the first point in your essay.

(Translation of essay from the Cambridge English-Spanish Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Translation of essay | GLOBAL English–Spanish Dictionary

(Translation of essay from the GLOBAL English-Spanish Dictionary © 2020 K Dictionaries Ltd)

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How to Translate an Essay from English to Spanish

Use an online translator, get help from a native speaker, always, always, edit.

Translating an English essay into Spanish may seem like a formidable task. You probably already know that just keying your essay into an internet translator probably isn't the best way to go about accomplishing this task since these translation tools ignore linguistic nuances and differences in grammar between the two languages. That being said, ‌ use of such a spanish translation device in conjunction with other measures should yield a result in which you can take pride and that you will have no fear of showing to native Spanish speakers. ‌

After using Microsoft office, ‌ type your entire essay into an online translator like Babelfish ‌. A link to this site is provided in the resources section. When the essay is translated into Spanish, copy the translated essay into your word processor and save a copy of it the same way you have saved your original essay. ‌ This is not all you need to do in order to translate an essay, but it will give you an idea of how long your essay will be when translated into Spanish. ‌

‌ Consult a Spanish speaker for a more professional translation. ‌ This can be either someone who is a native Spanish speaker or someone fluent in Spanish. The more Spanish this person knows, the better. Show this person your essay--both the English one and Spanish version you translated--and see if he or she is willing to fix any errors in grammar. It's best if you show this person hard copies so that he or she can write in any needed corrections. If you don't know anyone who speaks Spanish, you can hire someone to do this for you by posting a translation project on a site like Elance or Guru. Links to these sites are provided in the resources section.

‌ Edit the Spanish version of your essay ‌. Now that you know what changes to make in order for your essay to be properly translated, pull up the version you got from the online translation tool and make those changes. Save the new version of your translation.

‌ For any final revisions needed in your essay, you will need to get in touch with somebody whose native language is Spanish because he or she will be able to pick up on linguistic nuances that the first person you consulted may have missed. ‌ Even if the first person who worked on your translation was a native speaker, it's a good idea to get more than one perspective on a proper translation. Contacting Spanish teachers in your community is a good way to go about this.

‌ Make final revisions. ‌ Go back and make any changes your final proofreader recommended for your essay. Now you have a document translation good enough to stand under the critical scrutiny of a native Spanish speaker.

One good thing about machine translation such as google translate is that ‌ there is a plethora of options to translate english to ‌ such as chinese, japanese, portuguese, italian, russian, french, arabic, turkish, polish, swedish, czech, dutch, Ukrainian, korean, danish, finnish, indonesian, romanian, slovak, hungarian, estonian, slovenian, bulgarian, hindi, thai, norwegian, vietnamese, lithuanian, and many more.

Never trust Babelfish or other online translation services as a foolproof tool.

Translation software isn’t necessary, there are plenty of free online translators available

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

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This resource provides information on strategies that the students can use when incorporating languages other than English in their academic texts.

You will have to decide whether you need to keep the text in original, translate, or present the readers with both. The decision about the strategy you use for incorporating the non-English materials in your writing should be based on a number of considerations, including:

The familiarity of the language and culture that you expect from your audience

A research paper in your Spanish literature class might draw more heavily on Spanish language, because most of your readers will know some of it.

The attention that you put on the specific vocabulary that you are bringing into your writing

When an author used a particular term in their language and this term has many equivalents in your language. For example, Martin Heidegger coined the German term Dasein , which is often translated into English as “being there” or “presence.” If you substituted discussing the term Dasein with the word presence , the readers might come to the conclusion that it is a term that has no relation to Dasein. This might lead them to believe that you are using it in the original meaning of presence that has no relation to the Heideggerian definition of Dasein .

The effect you want to have on your audience

You can shape your audience’s reading experience and expectations by considering what effect using an untranslated text will have on the readers, in relationship to the purpose you set for your writing. The reason why parts a text might be left untranslated can vary between writers. For instance, you might require the audience to take a more active part in decoding the text and working on the translation on their own. Another reason might be offering the audience the experience of attempting to read a text in a language they have not learned before, in order to challenge them and provide them with that experience. Other reasons that you set for the audience you are writing for are valid too.

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Paste your text into our tool and let the online Spanish grammar checker help you with the correct punctuation.

Avoid confusing words

Is it “llendo” or “yendo”? Many Spanish words sound the same, but are spelled differently.

With the Spanish spell checker, you can make sure you’re saying exactly what you want.

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Would you like to check all your texts with one tool? With Scribbr you can correct Spanish as well as French, German and English texts.

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The Scribbr Grammar Checker is a tailor-made AI-powered tool that can correct basic language, grammar, style, and spelling errors. We run it so that our editors are free to focus on what they do best: making sure that your paper is free of more nuanced mistakes and providing you with helpful feedback and writing tips.

The Scribbr Grammar Checker is a pro at correcting basic mistakes – and a human editor will still be carefully reviewing your full text – so you can rest assured that your paper is in very good hands!

When you receive back a document that has been reviewed by the Scribbr Grammar Checker, you’ll see two sets of tracked changes in it: one set from the grammar checker and one set from your editor. That way, you can easily tell who made what changes in your paper.

Not sure how tracked changes work in Word or how to review your edited file? Read our handy guide to learn more.

We tested ten of the most popular free grammar checkers to see how many errors they could fix in our sample text and deducted points for any new errors introduced. We also evaluated the tools’ usability.

When compared all the other grammar checkers we tested for this comparison and Scribbr performed exceptionally well. It was successful in detecting and correcting 19 of the 20 errors. See the full review here .

If our grammar checker flags an error that is not actually an error, you have several options:

1. Ignore the error: Most grammar checkers allow users to skip or ignore suggestions they do not agree with or find irrelevant. If you are confident that the flagged “error” is not an issue, you can bypass the suggestion and move on to the next one.

2. Review the context: Take a moment to thoroughly review the context surrounding the flagged error. Sometimes, the initial correct usage might still create confusion or ambiguity within the specific context, and reconsidering the phrasing could improve overall clarity.

Yes, this grammar checker covers the following mistakes:

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3. Punctuation: Detection and rectification of punctuation errors, including incorrect use of commas, periods, colons, and other punctuation.

4. Word choice errors: Catch words that sound similar but aren’t, like their vs. they’re and your vs. you’re.

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For more details, feel free to read our test of the best English grammar checkers.

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By Molly Yurick | Compass author

The Spanish language is as beautiful as it is diverse. It’s a global language with an estimated 500 million native speakers and is the official language of 21 countries. But every country, culture, and community uses Spanish in its own way. Differences can be seen in vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and more. For example, a word used every day in Spain can mean something quite different – or even be offensive! – in Venezuela, or vice versa. 

If you need to translate documents or content into Spanish, you must first identify your target audience and choose the appropriate variant.

How many Spanish variants are there?

It’s hard to put an exact number on this, but here are some of the most common Spanish variants that cover large target audiences:

• European Spanish is spoken in Spain. Choose this variant if your audience is located in Europe. The Castilian variant is the most different from others because it’s the most isolated, both geographically and culturally.
• If your audience is broad and located throughout Latin America, then your translation should be in Latin American Spanish. This variant avoids using country-specific colloquialisms so it can be understood by Spanish speakers across the continent.
• If you’re aiming to reach the 53 million Spanish speakers living in the United States, go for the U.S. Spanish variant. Many people believe the U.S. Spanish variant is the same as Latin American Spanish. It’s not. U.S. Spanish has its own peculiarities, such as using English numbering conventions, sentence structure, and a whole lot of anglicisms. For example, “Dame chance,” translates as “ Give me a chance,” and “¿Me das un ride?” translates as “Can you give me a ride?”
• Although most of the world’s Spanish-speaking countries are located in Latin America, each has its own variant. If your audience is geographically located in one specific country, translate into their specific variant.
• There are no native speakers of Neutral Spanish, but everyone can understand it. Neutral Spanish is free of country-specific colloquialisms and uses simple language so any Spanish speaker, anywhere in the world, can read and understand your content. If you don’t have a specific audience in mind, neutral Spanish is the way to go.

Why is choosing the right Spanish variant important?

The short answer is because you want to connect with your audience. It’s important that they understand the message you’re trying to get across, loud and clear. 

Let me demonstrate what I mean using the two most common variants, Latin American Spanish and European Spanish:

The word computer translates into European Spanish as ordenador and into LATAM Spanish as computadora. Car translates into European Spanish as coche but into LATAM Spanish as carro . Cell phone in translates into European Spanish as móvil , but celular in most Latin American countries. You’ll find even more differences at the country level. For example, in many Spanish-speaking countries, girlfriend is translated as novia , but in Chile people say polola. And the list goes on and on!

In terms of grammar, pronoun usage provides a great example. In European Spanish, vosotros is used for the third-person plural you , while in Latin American Spanish ustedes instead. Both vosotros and ustedes come with their own verb conjugations, too. 

Spanish uses different levels of address to mark formality, but the way this is done can vary across variants. In most countries, you can be translated as tú (informal address) or usted (formal address). But the formal address isn’t used in the same way across cultures. For example, Spaniards use the formal address much less often than Mexicans. In Mexico, you could easily offend someone by using an informal address with the wrong person at the wrong time. But in Spain, you could actually offend someone by using the formal address, depending on the person and context. 

Pronunciation

Spain stands out for their unique pronunciation of the letters Z and C, depending on where the letter is placed in the word. For example, Spaniards pronounce the city of Barcelona as Barthelona, while Latin Americans say Barselona.  

The power of knowledge when choosing a Spanish variant

When you invest in translation, you want to get the most bang for your buck. That means using a translation that best reaches your audience. And that starts with choosing the right Spanish variant. 

But ensuring your message resonates with your target audience doesn’t stop there. You also need to pick the right translator for the job. My advice: Look for a professional who is a native speaker of the variant of Spanish you’re looking for and get it right the first time.

Start your search in the American Translators Association directory . A large portion of its almost 9,000 members are native Spanish speakers, so you’re sure to find a professional who speaks the variant and specializes in the types of text you need translated.

For more advice on how to hire a translator, check out this quick and easy guide .

About t he Author

Molly Yurick  is a Spanish to English subtitler and translator. Her subtitles can be seen on Netflix and she specializes in tourism translation. She is also an active volunteer for the American Translators Association. The American Translators Association represents almost 9,000 translators and interpreters in more than 100 countries. To hire a translation or interpreting professional, please visit  www.atanet.org/directory .

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The End of Foreign-Language Education

Thanks to AI, people may no longer feel the need to learn a second language.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I’ve been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I’m far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. “My favorite food is sushi,” I said— wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi —with no hint of excitement or joy.

I’d created the video using software from a Los Angeles–based artificial-intelligence start-up called HeyGen. It allows users to generate deepfake videos of real people “saying” almost anything based on a single picture of their face and a script, which is paired with a synthetic voice and can be translated into more than 40 languages. By merely uploading a selfie taken on my iPhone, I was able to glimpse a level of Mandarin fluency that may elude me for the rest of my life.

HeyGen’s visuals are flawed—the way it animates selfies almost reminded me of the animatronics in Disney’s It’s a Small World ride—but its language technology is good enough to make me question whether learning Mandarin is a wasted effort. Neural networks, the machine-learning systems that power generative-AI programs such as ChatGPT, have rapidly improved the quality of automatic translation over the past several years, making even older tools like Google Translate far more accurate.

At the same time, the number of students studying foreign languages in the U.S. and other countries is shrinking. Total enrollment in language courses other than English at American colleges decreased 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, according to the latest data from the Modern Language Association, better known as the MLA. In Australia, only 8.6 percent of high-school seniors were studying a foreign language in 2021—a historic low. In South Korea and New Zealand , universities are closing their French, German, and Italian departments. One recent study from the education company EF Education First found that English proficiency is decreasing among young people in some places.

Many factors could help explain the downward trend, including pandemic-related school disruptions, growing isolationism, and funding cuts to humanities programs. But whether the cause of the shift is political, cultural, or some mix of things, it’s clear that people are turning away from language learning just as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous across the internet.

Read: High-school English needed a makeover before ChatGPT

Within a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one. Something enormous will be lost in exchange for that convenience. Studies have suggested that language shapes the way people interpret reality. Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.

AI language tools are now in social-media apps, messaging platforms, and streaming sites. Spotify is experimenting with using a voice-generation tool from the ChatGPT maker OpenAI to translate podcasts in the host’s own voice, while Samsung is touting that its new Galaxy S24 smartphone can translate phone calls as they’re occurring . Roblox, meanwhile, claimed last month that its AI translation tool is so fast and accurate , its English-speaking users might not realize that their conversation partner “is actually in Korea.” The technology—which works especially well for “ high-resource languages ” such as English and Chinese, and less so for languages such as Swahili and Urdu—is being used in much more high-stakes situations as well, such as translating the testimony of asylum seekers and firsthand accounts from conflict zones. Musicians are already using it to translate songs , and at least one couple credited it with helping them to fall in love.

One of the most telling use cases comes from a start-up called Jumpspeak, which makes a language-learning app similar to Duolingo and Babbel. Instead of hiring actual bilingual actors, Jumpspeak appears to have used AI-generated “people” reading AI-translated scripts in at least four ads on Instagram and Facebook. At least some of the personas shown in the ads appear to be default characters available on HeyGen’s platform. “I struggled to learn languages my whole life. Then I learned Spanish in six months, I got a job opportunity in France, and I learned French. I learned Mandarin before visiting China,” a synthetic avatar says in one of the ads, while switching between all three languages. Even a language-learning app is surrendering to the allure of AI, at least in its marketing.

Alexandru Voica, a communications professional who works for another video-generating AI service, told me he came across Jumpspeak’s ads while looking for a program to teach his children Romanian, the language spoken by their grandparents. He argued that the ads demonstrated how deepfakes and automated-translation software could be used to mislead or deceive people. “I'm worried that some in the industry are currently in a race to the bottom on AI safety,” he told me in an email. (The ads were taken down after I started reporting this story, but it’s not clear if Meta or Jumpspeak removed them; neither company returned requests for comment. HeyGen also did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its product being used in Jumpspeak’s marketing.)

The world is already seeing how all of this can go wrong. Earlier this month, a far-right conspiracy theorist shared several AI-generated clips on X of Adolf Hitler giving a 1939 speech in English instead of the original German. The videos, which were purportedly produced using software from a company called ElevenLabs, featured a re-creation of Hitler’s own voice. It was a strange experience, hearing Hitler speak in English, and some people left comments suggesting that they found him easy to empathize with: “It sounds like these people cared about their country above all else,” one X user reportedly wrote in response to the videos. ElevenLabs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ( The Atlantic uses ElevenLabs’ AI voice generator to narrate some articles.)

Read: The last frontier of machine translation

Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, told me that part of the problem with machine-translation programs is that they’re often falsely perceived as being neutral, rather than “bringing their own perspective upon how to move text from one language to another.” The truth is that there is no single right or correct way to transpose a sentence from French to Russian or any other language—it’s an art rather than a science. “Students will ask, ‘How do you say this in Spanish?’ and I’ll say, ‘You just don’t say it the same way in Spanish; the way you would approach it is different,’” Deborah Cohn, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has written about the importance of language learning for bolstering U.S. national security , told me.

I recently came across a beautiful and particularly illustrative example of this fact in an article written by a translator in China named Anne. “Building a ladder between widely different languages, such as Chinese and English, is sometimes as difficult as a doctor building a bridge in a patient's heart,” she wrote. The metaphor initially struck me as slightly odd, but thankfully I wasn’t relying on ChatGPT to translate Anne’s words from their original Mandarin. I was reading a human translation by a professor named Jeffrey Ding, who helpfully noted that Anne may have been referring to a type of heart surgery that has recently become common in China. It's a small detail, but understanding that context brought me much closer to the true meaning of what Anne was trying to say.

Read: The college essay is dead

But most students will likely never achieve anything close to the fluency required to tell whether a translation rings close enough to the original or not. If professors accept that automated technology will far outpace the technical skills of the average Russian or Arabic major, their focus would ideally shift from grammar drills to developing cultural competency , or understanding the beliefs and practices of people from different backgrounds. Instead of cutting language courses in response to AI, schools should “stress more than ever the intercultural components of language learning that tremendously benefit the students taking these classes,” Jen William, the head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University and a member of the executive committee of the Association of Language Departments, told me.

Paula Krebs, the executive director of the MLA, referenced a beloved 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to make a similar point. In “Darmok,” the crew aboard the starship Enterprise struggles to communicate with aliens living on a planet called El-Adrel IV. They have access to a “universal translator” that allows them to understand the basic syntax and semantics of what the Tamarians are saying, but the greater meaning of their utterances remains a mystery.

It later becomes clear that their language revolves around allegories rooted in the Tamarians’ unique history and practices. Even though Captain Picard was translating all the words they were saying, he “couldn’t understand the metaphors of their culture,” Krebs told me. More than 30 years later, something like a universal translator is now being developed on Earth. But it similarly doesn’t have the power to bridge cultural divides the way that humans can.

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OpenAI Unveils A.I. Technology That Recreates Human Voices

The start-up is sharing the technology, Voice Engine, with a small group of early testers as it tries to understand the potential dangers.

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By Cade Metz

Reporting from San Francisco

First, OpenAI offered a tool that allowed people to create digital images simply by describing what they wanted to see. Then, it built similar technology that generated full-motion video like something from a Hollywood movie.

Now, it has unveiled technology that can recreate someone’s voice.

The high-profile A.I. start-up said on Friday that a small group of businesses was testing a new OpenAI system, Voice Engine, that can recreate a person’s voice from a 15-second recording. If you upload a recording of yourself and a paragraph of text, it can read the text using a synthetic voice that sounds like yours.

The text does not have to be in your native language. If you are an English speaker, for example, it can recreate your voice in Spanish, French, Chinese or many other languages.

OpenAI is not sharing the technology more widely because it is still trying to understand its potential dangers. Like image and video generators, a voice generator could help spread disinformation across social media. It could also allow criminals to impersonate people online or during phone calls.

The company said it was particularly worried that this kind of technology could be used to break voice authenticators that control access to online banking accounts and other personal applications.

“This is a sensitive thing, and it is important to get it right,” an OpenAI product manager, Jeff Harris, said in an interview.

The company is exploring ways of watermarking synthetic voices or adding controls that prevent people from using the technology with the voices of politicians or other prominent figures.

Last month, OpenAI took a similar approach when it unveiled its video generator, Sora. It showed off the technology but did not publicly release it.

OpenAI is among the many companies that have developed a new breed of A.I. technology that can quickly and easily generate synthetic voices. They include tech giants like Google as well as start-ups like the New York-based ElevenLabs. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, on claims of copyright infringement involving artificial intelligence systems that generate text.)

Businesses can use these technologies to generate audiobooks, give voice to online chatbots or even build an automated radio station DJ. Since last year, OpenAI has used its technology to power a version of ChatGPT that speaks . And it has long offered businesses an array of voices that can be used for similar applications. All of them were built from clips provided by voice actors.

But the company has not yet offered a public tool that would allow individuals and businesses to recreate voices from a short clip as Voice Engine does. The ability to recreate any voice in this way, Mr. Harris said, is what makes the technology dangerous. The technology could be particularly dangerous in an election year, he said.

In January, New Hampshire residents received robocall messages that dissuaded them from voting in the state primary in a voice that was most likely artificially generated to sound like President Biden . The Federal Communications Commission later outlawed such calls .

Mr. Harris said OpenAI had no immediate plans to make money from the technology. He said the tool could be particularly useful to people who lost their voices through illness or accident.

He demonstrated how the technology had been used to recreate a woman’s voice after brain cancer damaged it. She could now speak, he said, after providing a brief recording of a presentation she had once made as a high schooler.

Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz

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Amazon said it had added $2.75 billion to its investment in Anthropic , an A.I. start-up that competes with companies like OpenAI and Google.

Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a bill  to prevent the use of A.I. to copy a performer’s voice. It is the first such measure in the United States.

French regulators said Google failed to notify news publishers  that it was using their articles to train its A.I. algorithms, part of a wider ruling against the company for its negotiating practices with media outlets.

Apple is in discussions with Google  about using Google’s generative A.I. model called Gemini for its next iPhone.

The Age of A.I.

The Caribbean island Anguilla made $32 million last year, more than 10 percent of its G.D.P., from companies registering web addresses that end in .ai .

When it comes to the A.I. that powers chatbots like ChatGPT, China trails the United States. But when it comes to producing the scientists behind a new generation of humanoid technologies, China is pulling ahead . Silicon Valley leaders are lobbying Congress on the dangers of falling behind .

By interacting with data about genes and cells, A.I. models have made some surprising discoveries and are learning what it means to be alive. What could they teach us someday ?

Covariant, a robotics start-up, is using the technology behind chatbots  to build robots that learn skills much like ChatGPT does.