: Re: Is it plagiarism to use Google Translate? This may be a very very stupid question but I need to ask it. I have written my dissertation in my mother tongue first, then began to translate it

@Shelton455

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I think plagiarism is not the real issue here. It's ultimately about the second part of your question -- what it means for the quality of the end result.

I don't know about dissertations but I was recently talking to someone who knows multiple languages and asked him about whether tools like Google Translate can ever really substitute for human translation. Perhaps not surprisingly, his answer was no, in part because of the many nuances and complexity of languages. If you're going to be submitting a dissertation, you want to have something that looks and reads as professionally as possible.

More details on the technical nature of this debate are in this article.

Depending on how often you're going to be referencing material in another language, I'd even think about learning it, or at least the basics. There proliferation of ESL classes and
French classes has prompted a lot of other organizations to provide classes where you can become fluent relatively quickly.

Good luck with your dissertation!

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