Аңдатпа
“I mean [my] sentences are different from English; they look like Arabic, but the words are in English.” These are the words of Reem (pseudonym), one of my first-year English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduate students at an Omani international university who reflected on the output of Google Translate as she went about completing a writing task. This quote highlights an inherent contradiction: Reem was aware of the shortcomings of Google Translate for formal writing practices, but she still consulted it as a resource to draft and edit her work. To synthesize her ideas with those embedded in course reading materials, Reem reported relying on Google Translate to translate her ideas from Arabic into English. She occasionally conducted reverse translation turning the produced text from English back into Arabic to check for accuracy and relevance. This will probably resonate with many language learners or student writers in EFL contexts who depend on online translators to address some of their problems in writing and with many teachers whose students' use of such applications to complete graded written work has created contradictions and conflicts. Given that students' use of online informal technologies for formal language learning has recently gained momentum (Lee, 2021; Naghdipour, 2022), understanding their strategic behavior in exploiting these tools could better inform our pedagogical policies and practices. In this article, I report on some of these contradictions and conflicts and the strategies I used to mitigate their likely impacts on my students' learning.