Doug Peterson is one of my favourite bloggers. For a while now, each Sunday at 5:00, he shares a recap of his reading highlights from the week. Since Doug often points me to interesting stories, blogs, and news articles, I always enjoy perusing this weekly post. As part of each post, Doug often includes some “technology troubleshooting.” While I like reading these troubleshooting stories, Doug’s far more advanced than me in his technology skills, so I’ll admit that I frequently sit in awe of what he accomplishes and his thought process throughout. An experience today though had me thinking more about “technology troubleshooting.”

I was out with a friend for lunch today, and when I returned home, I heard from another friend of mine. She just received a personal report from a doctor in Montreal, but the report was in French. She was hoping that I might be able to help her translate it. Now I’ve used Google translate many times before, but never for text contained in a document. I figured that there must be a way to do this. I started with the help of Google.

I thought about asking “how to translate a document from French to English.” Google suggested a couple of different apps. I downloaded both of them. Apps are always easy … right?! These might have been easy, but in order to translate documents, they required a paid subscription. No thank you. There must be another way.

I went back to Google, and saw a list of steps to translate a document from my computer. Perfect! I would just download the file to my computer and go from there. I’m good at following steps. It was going great until I saw this message.

At this point, I gave up. I called my friend back and explained that since the document was scanned, I could not translate it. She would need to call her doctor to ask for a translated document or a copy of the original text (that I could then copy and translate). She thanked me for the help, and figured that she would investigate more tomorrow.

While there was no push for me to do any more, I couldn’t stop thinking about this translating problem. There must be something that I could do. I decided to sit with the problem until after dinner tonight. At one point during my Google investigations, I saw that you could use the Lens App for translating documents. I have Microsoft Lens on my iPhone. I know that with Lens, you can share documents to the Immersive Reader. This got me thinking: text in the Immersive Reader would no longer appear as scanned. If I could then export this text, I could copy it and put it into Google Translate. Hmmm …

• I took a screenshot of the report.
• I opened the screenshot in the Lens app.
• I shared it to the Immersive Reader.
• Then I exported it from the Immersive Reader and opened it in Word.
• I copied the text from Word and put it into Google Translate.
• I translated the text to English.
• Then I copied the English text and emailed it back to my friend.

Yay! Something that I was sure today wouldn’t work — and couldn’t work — did work with a few additional attempts, some extra wait time, and the drive to solve this problem.

In another moment of problem solving joy, as I’m writing this blog post, I realized that I could have done the same thing in fewer steps.

• Take a screenshot of the report.
• Open the screenshot in the Lens app.
• Save it to Word.
• Copy the text from Word and put it into Google Translate.
• Translate the text to English.
• Copy the English text and send it back to my friend.

While I haven’t tested it out, I could probably have exported this Word Document as a PDF, saved it to my computer, and followed the steps to translate a document that I started out with earlier this afternoon.

Why bother blogging about this? Even as an adult, it’s amazing how much joy you can feel when you solve a hard problem.

• What’s a hard problem for you, might not be for someone else.
• Maybe your solution to the problem is just one of many, but that’s okay.
• If we want to understand how students feel when challenged with problems, maybe we also need to experience this for ourselves.
• Could reflecting on the process of how we solve a challenging problem, help us when guiding and/or supporting kids?

When was the last time that you had to do some troubleshooting? What’s your story? I’m going to be looking out for a few more troubleshooting experiences this summer. It’s amazing how good you can feel when something that you don’t think can work, actually does!

Aviva