Sabina
Kids 🙂
(Sorry, I'm a bit older)
Google Translate is extremely bad at translation for "output purposes" (e.g. if you want to give away the results to people who are speakers of said language).
(Might I suggest DeepL for output translations, which is really significantly better at getting context better. Better in this case means, it usually passes first glance inspection without rolled eyes, and after a real reading it's usually for EN->to non-EN translations a sensible non-native-speaker done translation, not perfect, but then in most countries you do have foreigners living with you, right?)
Google Translate (or Bing, LibreTranslate) are all better used to do "input translations", e.g. you try to read a text in a language (say Polish) you do not know or know badly. It's usually much easier to guess the meaning from "broken text" in a language you know, than guess for a small number of words the correct formulation in a foreign language.
Sadly the translation addon for Flarum costs money, so I can understand why the forum will not start to go multi-lingual. (Even if the gang would feel comfortable with this.)
Last but not least, the topic of school/university are highly cultural and legal, thus very different between countries. E.g. in Austria, when you have your Matura, you basically walk to your university of choice, and say I want to study Mathematics. (Footnote: due to the fact not all EU states do it like this, we were forced to add entry exams for some overly popular study courses. Like medicine.) In other countries, you get say your SAT scores, etc and then apply with a number of universities, and the universities chose to offer you a place or not. That's not even comparable. So how can there be 1:1 translations for the process of joining an university?
You'll find that this is quite often the case that languages have more "gray scales" for topics that are relevant in their communities, e.g. I've found that Austria has a way more complex system of "social housing" which is totally incomprehensible to typical Americans (or the Anglosphere). Yes my family lives in "social housing". But we have do have more luxury perks than many high end condo complexes with concierge service say in London. Yeah, had funny discussions with British snobs about that. They simply could not wrap their head about us calling this social housing 😀 [Genossenschaftswohnung]
(Actually for historical reasons the German, Austrian and Polish systems are reasonable similar, the Polish even call the Matura the same, the Germans call it Abitur, and it basically serves a very similar function. Side rant: if I got it right and @Sabina actually studies law, she probably had already a lecture explaining about the partitions and why they are relevant even for modern Polish law)
So I would suggest, if you need to use a translator to find a translation, include in brackets the original term. This way, if you guess wrong, or the reader is scratching his/her clever head, they can highlight the original term, press "Google …" and worst case get a better explanation of this, or at least realize it's a translation issue.
Just my two cents, ah, that works now at least in the Eurozone, the USA, and Canada.
(If that wasn't a great reason for introducing a common currency in Europe 😆 )
Sorry for the long rant about translations, but I've noticed that this issue creeps up from time to time, and this post I reply to is fresh 😀
George
