In this free course, you will learn to implement freely available online machine translation tools (OMT) such as Google Translate or DeepL into your language learning or teaching.
The course is aimed at learners and teachers of all languages and levels. It introduces the uses of AI in language learning and provides activities and examples of how to use online machine translation tools to further language learning.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
- identify and critically assess freely available digital machine translation tools and recognise the relationship between machine translation and human input
- engage with and reflect on individually tailored learning resources to support language learning, using freely available digital machine translation tools
- use machine translation activities to enhance language learning and use these activities as models to create further activities to address individual learning needs
- use freely available digital machine translation tools responsibly and in line with good academic practice.
First Published: 20/05/2025
Updated: 20/05/2025
Prospective students 𝗺𝗮𝘆 have initially assumed, purely from the title "Machine translation in language learning and teaching" that the course might have included greater technical information, for example, on the underlying algorithms used by OMT, but the course most certainly does meet its 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 objectives!
Aside: on Firefox, within Session 1 Section 3 Activity 2 the answers when highlighting with green and yellow were reversed, as confirmed by "Table 1 The benefits and limitations of OMT for language learners and teachers".