Stop browser translation of online foreign language assignments

[szw496]

I am an online foreign language teacher, and I suspect but can't prove that my students may simply be translating their assignment pages using their browser. The browser can simply translate an entire page into English. The browser can also translate all the answers they type back into the target language.

I know that there is an html command to override the browser's ability to translate, and one can put it into the code at the beginning of the page. But CANVAS does not accept the command, I assume for security reasons. There is no such command on the whitelisted commands for CANVAS. 

Is it possible to get a "don't translate" or "stop translation" command whitelisted? I think this has implications for all online foreign language courses. There are workarounds, but they are so time consuming that they can't be practically employed. There are secure exam sites that cost tens of thousands of dollars to use. It would be so simple just to have a command at the top of the page to ensure against cheating.

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Hi  @szw496  Welcome to the Canvas Community. You ask a question that has been the bane of many a foreign language professor since such services began being integrated within Chrome (primarily) or through other browser add-ons. The short answer is there is simply no way to prevent this within Canvas natively....or, frankly, much anything on the web.  There have been similar questions asked here in the past, including one here from a few years ago which remains valid:  Translating Question (Spanish Teacher) .  Other than doing an online quiz in a secured lab environment where such extensions can be disabled, there is little that you can do for an online course save for some third-party solutions.  (And besides, what's to keep an enterprising student from doing a quick lookup on a smartphone or a separate device?

Anyway, the one third-party solution I'm aware of is through Respondus, though they are not the only one.  For proctored, lab environments there is the Lockdown Browser (which we have at my institution in labs), and for online courses there is the Respondus Monitor, which I personally have no experience with.

Frankly, it may be time to bring this up with some higher-ups at your institution if this is affecting online courses or to have other ways of assessing the students....which I realize is not easy to do!

[szw496]

Thanks for your response. The solution to students looking things up on a separate device is timed exams and assignments. They lose time if they need to look up everything. The solution to cutting and pasting in translation software is that it leaves translation tags behind in the code, so I can see the evidence of cheating and also prove it. Also, a solution to preventing translation of longer passages is to upload them as images instead of as text. So I have at least found limited solutions to those potential problems.

But when the whole page translates, that doesn't take any extra time, and it leaves no evidence behind that I can see. Might there be traces in the code if students use the translate page option?! That would also be a solution if we could see evidence that they did it that way, because then we could prove a breach in academic integrity, and that is all I would need in terms of a solution. My html skills are rudimentary, so I don't know what I would be looking for.

So the html command that I saw on a Google search to stop the translation feature would not work? I'm not clear on why this would not work.

I've heard that separate secure browser environments cost money, which is why I think it isn't an option for us, and which is why I'm trying to come up with other options. My general belief is that if one is creative enough, one might stay one step ahead of cheating opportunities. Perhaps this is naive.

Any additional feedback would be most appreciated.

Sharon