Vocabulary Variables

Do you have a student in your classroom who can read and write in their home language, but are still learning vocabulary in English? Are you teaching a Core French unit and need a vocabulary list? This is a quick and easy way to translate multiple vocabulary words from English into your target language. 
1. Go to your Google Drive and open a Google Sheet.
2. Down the first column, type the vocabulary words you want to translate, one vocabulary word per cell.
3. To translate into French, in the first cell of the second column, type the following: =googletranslate(A1,”en”,”fr") and hit enter.
4. Click on the first cell in the second column, then, with your cursor, grab the blue square at the bottom right of the cell and pull it down the column. This will translate the rest of your column of vocabulary words into French.
 To translate into a different language than French, simply replace the “fr” with the two-letter code for your target language.  If you are translating to a language that uses gendered articles, you may want to add the article in English (for example, “a coat” to get “un manteau”).
 Some common languages we often need to translate to are:
Simplified Chinese: zh-CN
Filipino: tl
French: fr
Hindi: hi
Japanese: ja
Korean: ko
Farsi: fa
Portuguese: pt
Russian: ru
Spanish: es

A complete list of two letter language codes can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/opti365/translate_codes
Caveat: this process is using Google Translate as the vehicle for translation, so some errors will be inevitable. Which is true of any translation attempt we make into languages we ourselves don’t speak, barring using a native speaker as an interpreter.