Adeola Abdulateef Elega

2.7.1 The Role of Google Translates and Other Translation Mobile Applications 
Translation assistance services online and in mobile application form are solely for 
scholars, travelers, tourist, language learners, students (international students) and 
people who travel for study of a certain subject. The basic idea behind this online 
assistance is to help get access to information in a preferred language. In the case of 
any of the aforementioned, translation assistance service is very important for their 
mission. It will help you comport yourself, ask fewer questions from people and feel 
at home as much as possible. This assistance makes you want to do everything all by 
yourself which will make everything bright and beautiful for the user of the 
application. For instance, in the case of an international student who is from 
Tanzania and he is schooling in France. These are two extremes because in Tanzania, 
they speak Swahili and English language and in France, they speak French which is a 
major barrier so one can imagine how much translation services could be of help 
within the school and even in the host community of the imaginary institution. 
Google translate is a workable tool in this discourse and it is helpful in making 
communication in another language easier as earlier mentioned. The online service is 
a translation assistance owned by google which helps one to get immediate 
translation of words in different languages, majorly international languages. Words, 
phrases, clauses, sentences and even webpages can be entered to get translation in the 
chosen language. Translation is done by check on millions of already translated 
works and so your request is gotten according to the database to get accurate and 

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most appropriate answer. This check is done because the database checked is a 
human effort and so it gives an almost appropriate answer. Google translate supports 
80 international languages which Turkish, English and Afrikaans is included as in the 
basis of this discourse (Google translate, 2014). For flexibility, Google translate 
toolkit was launched to help consumers of this product expand on the service. With 
google translate toolkit, user can edit and save translated works. It can link you up 
with someone who can help you with translation which of course will be superior to 
machine translation. In essence a native speaker of the language preferred will most 
definitely give a better translation (Goss, 2012). 
The Android Google-translate mobile application helps you converse with and 
through the application. Your preferred translation is read out loud to your hearing. 
This I find interesting because most times it is not all about the words but how they 
are pronounced. Changing to words containing “C” in Turkish will need you to 
pronounce Ercan as Erjan, Sabanci as Sabanji for an English person to be correct. 
Also changing a word from Turkish to English for a Turkish person needs you to 
pronounce psychology as “sycology” and knife as “nife”. This application has made 
it possible to do so. The application lets you get a conversation partner as earlier 
discussed which gives you a perfect translation. Godwin-Jones (2011) accedes that; 
“
Google Translate for Android offers an interesting experimental feature 
using voice. “Conversation mode” lets users translate an utterance into the 
target language, which is then read aloud. One’s conversation partner can 
then speak in the target language and have in turn that response be translated 
and read aloud”( Godwin-Jones 2011 p.5). 

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Other translation mobile apps are Itranslate voice, pixter scanner OCR, ivoice 
translator pro; most of which have also have same features with google translate and 
additional features like voice translation and dictionary. 
In the last decade, higher education has become the major source of income for the 
TRNC. In line with this, numerous students from different parts of the world come to 
North Cyprus. These students arrive to study in an English medium university. Yet, 
the language spoken in the street is Turkish. Foreign students have culture shock and 
language barrier becomes an impediment to their communication. This is the 
pioneering study conducted that explores the difficulties foreign students face.