Is there a way to make text on website so that an iPad cannot translate it?

Question

I'm fairly sure the answer is a simple "No," but might as well ask. I work in education. My coworkers are foreign language teachers who use Canvas LMS. All students have one-to-one iPads. Students know they can highlight a word and click "Translate" to translate the word, and they use this to cheat very regularly. The best solution at the moment is to create questions as images of text, so students can't highlight words, but this is tedious and obviously the text doesn't wrap properly on different screens when the text is an image, so most teachers gave up this practice. Some use monitoring software to try to catch students cheating. Some use paper exams. There are obvious solutions here. I'm looking for a solution that allows students to use their iPads without the teacher needing to worry about translation. Completely disabling or removing the built-in Translate app is not a good solution, because the students may need the app for other classes or for personal reasons.

I've followed the advice on this post: How to disable Google translate from HTML in Chrome . Marvelous stuff. Adding class="notranslate" or the combination of lang="en" class="notranslate" translate="no" to various tags works great for disabling translation in Chrome on Windows devices. However, it does not work on the iPad, the built-in Translate app doesn't seem to care about the HTML attributes. Are there any other HTML tips and tricks that I can try to prevent the iPad from translating specific text, or is this a lost cause?

Answer 1

Assuming you have access to the custom theme editor, you should be able to make things unclickable. Pointer-events:none could work, but you would need to add a class for each item you didn't want to be translated. It could also affect the accessibility of your course.

On a side note, I'm the lead for Canvas's custom curriculum, and I've seen some great examples that our Spanish team have done. I've learned that such modifications to the tech only slow students down if they feel the pressure to cheat. You may consider modifying the curriculum such that it won't matter if they use translation. I'd be happy to discuss specific alternatives from that perspective.