It is very tempting to do part or even all of an assignment with a computer translator, online or otherwise, or to check and modify your work using one. It's "simple and easy": the student feeds English into the program, and gets what he or she assumes is an accurate Spanish translation.

It's also a disaster in many cases. The result is generally very peculiar Spanish. The sentences generated by these programs contain sequences of words that students, working on their own, would never think up. In other words, the machine makes errors that humans never make.

For this reason, "e-translator" language is very easy to spot. Here's some proof:

Real Online Examples with English as the Target Language
Suppose that you're a Spanish-speaking student doing an English assignment. You wish to translate two simple sentences from Spanish into English by feeding in the Spanish; here is what one online site gives you:

• Elena se pone muy irritada a veces. (Elena gets very irritated sometimes.)→
  • Elena is put irritated very sometimes.
• A mi hermano no le gusta la nieve. (My brother doesn't like snow.)→
  • Brother it does not like the snow.

Pretty bad English, don't you think? Trust me, that's what the Spanish looks like to me when the input and output languages are reversed.

Not only is the language terrible, but also work done in this way is not really the student's own work. This is, to be blunt, cheating.

For these reasons, I cannot award credit for any lesson that contains language generated by a computer translator.